The Swiss Islamologist Tariq Ramadan will appear from Monday, May 15 before a criminal court in Geneva for "rape and sexual coercion", which he denies en bloc.

The Swiss plaintiff, who says she lives under threat and therefore wishes to be called by the assumed name of "Brigitte", was in her forties at the time of the facts, which date back nearly 15 years. She claims that the Islamologist subjected her to brutal sexual acts accompanied by beatings and insults on the evening of October 28, 2008, in a hotel room in Geneva.

Tariq Ramadan, now 60 and threatened with a France trial for similar offences, admitted to having met her but claimed during the investigation to have given up having sex with her.

Case in France

The Swiss intellectual, a charismatic and contested figure in European Islam, faces between two and ten years in prison. Contacted by AFP, one of his French lawyers, Philippe Ohayon, declined to comment before the highly anticipated trial, which is expected to last two to three days. The judgment will be pronounced on May 24, told AFP the Geneva justice. Tariq Ramadan will be able to appeal.

Doctor of the University of Geneva where he wrote a thesis on the founder of the Egyptian Islamist brotherhood of the Muslim Brotherhood who was his grandfather, Tariq Ramadan was Professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom until November 2017 and invited to many universities in Morocco, Malaysia, Japan or Qatar. Popular in conservative Muslim circles, he remains contested, especially by supporters of secularism who see him as a supporter of political Islam.

In France, he is suspected of raping four women between 2009 and 2016, a case that triggered his downfall in 2017. In July, the Paris prosecutor's office requested that he be referred to the Assizes and it is up to the investigating judges in charge of the investigations to order a trial or not. The French case earned him more than nine months of pre-trial detention in 2018, from which he was released in November of the same year. It has remained under judicial control ever since.

Tariq Ramadan is required to reside in France but he has exceptional permits to leave French territory to travel to Switzerland in connection with the case heard this week in Geneva.

Intimate correspondence

A convert to Islam, "Brigitte" said during the investigation that she had met him at a signing session a few months before the night of October 28, 2008, and then at a conference in September. This was followed by an increasingly intimate correspondence on social networks. On the evening of the incident, she joined him in the hotel where he was staying in Geneva.

It is in her room that, for hours, he would have forced her to sexual acts, with violence, according to "Brigitte", who is a civil party. According to the indictment, he was guilty of "rape three times" during the same night and "sexual coercion", to the point of suffocating her. The Islamologist disputes these accusations.

"This trial for my client is an ordeal, not a therapy. She is waiting for the recognition of the suffering that has accompanied her for 15 years and that she has made a painful duty to reveal," her French lawyer François Zimeray, a former diplomat and human rights specialist, told AFP. "She expects a difficult, painful confrontation but she is ready for it, convinced that this fight is for her a duty as much as a test," he added.

She filed a complaint with the Geneva courts in April 2018, a few months after the Swiss media published anonymous testimonies from young Geneva schoolgirls, according to which in the 1990s Tariq Ramadan tried to seduce one of them and managed to have sexual relations with three others.

With AFP

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