France, thousands in the streets to demand justice for Sarah Halimi

PARIS – Thousands of people took to the streets all over France – 20,000 in Paris alone – responding to the call of collectives and representatives of the Jewish communities to protest against the renunciation of trying the culprit of the femicide of Sarah Halimi, 65, committed in 2017. The crime, with an anti-Semitic background, deeply shook the country and returned to the center of the public debate after the choice of the judges not to try the perpetrator, Kobili Traore, Halimi’s neighbor, who pushed her out of a window. The judges found that the man, who allegedly shouted “Allah u Akbar” when attacking her, was not criminally responsible despite confessing, because he was in a state of “severe delirium” due to the massive consumption of cannabis.

“Without justice there is no Republic”, read the main banner of the procession, which arrived at the Trocadero. In the lead, the collective ‘Arire for Sarah Halimi’. Many signs shown by demonstrators, such as ‘No rights without justice’ and ‘Justice stoned?’. “The protest has grown – he said William Attal, brother of the victim – and hope has returned. “Many have asked to change the existing law, which considers” irresponsible “whoever acts criminally under the influence of drugs.

Shortly before the demonstration, the Minister of Justice, Eric Dupond-Moretti, announced that at the end of May it will present a bill aimed at “filling a legal vacuum”. Appeal also launched by the president Emmanuel Macron.

On April 14, the Supreme Court confirmed the anti-Semitic nature of the crime, but also reiterating the criminal irresponsibility of the murderer, who had been hospitalized in a psychiatry ward since 2017, as “lacking in judgment at the time of the facts”. Traoré, a heavy cannabis user, would have been on the night of the crime in the throes of a sort of “delirium”. The President of the Representative Council of the Jewish Institutions of France (Crif), Francis Caliphate, he wished in an interview with Sunday Newspaper that the future law bears the name of Sarah Halimi: “It will be a form of homage that we pay her, since she could not have justice”.

Protest sit-in also in Rome, organized by the Jewish Community of Rome, near the French embassy. The demonstration – reads a note – took place simultaneously with the protests in Paris, Tel Aviv, New York and London, in a global contest.