Imam Hassen Chalghoumi has filed a complaint against La France Insoumise MEP Rima Hassan, whom he accuses of having targeted him with a “fatwa” on August 17 on X, AFP learned on Tuesday, August 26, from his lawyer. When asked, the MEP’s team, which has been the target of several complaints, spoke of “a new attempt at instrumentalisation on the part of Israel’s supporters, who are using Hassen Chalghoumi to legitimise judicial harassment against Rima Hassan”.
David-Olivier Kaminski, Hassen Chalghoumi’s lawyer, filed a complaint on Friday in Paris with the constitution of a civil party, a procedure aimed at obtaining the referral to an investigating judge. “This fatwa (…) is of a criminal violence unprecedented in France. Since 2023, Mrs. Hassan has escaped legal proceedings. With this complaint, we will see if all citizens are equal before the law or if some benefit from more leniency than others,” he said.
The complaint, which AFP has seen, targets the offence of provocation to the commission of an offence of intentional bodily harm as well as the crime of criminal association with a view to committing intentional homicide with premeditation, committed by an organised gang.
“A ‘pack’ of followers”
It will be up to the Paris prosecutor’s office, then an investigating judge, to take a position on the admissibility of the complaint before a possible investigation. On August 17, Rima Hassan published a message on X mentioning the names of Tunisian rapper Balti and French-Moroccan writer Nesrine Slaoui, two personalities she has criticized in the past, followed by a green tick emoji, synonymous with a job accomplished.
Hassen Chalghoumi’s name comes next in the same message, followed by an hourglass emoticon. The complaint believes that Rima Hassan “is building a ‘pack’ of followers (…) so that violence is attempted against” the imam.
Since the message of August 17, Rima Hassan “has never denied (…) his intention to incite an attempt on [his] life,” the complaint insists. “The tweet mentioned pointed to Chalghoumi’s manifest hypocrisy, on Islam as well as on Palestine, like the two other people also named in the tweet. This tweet was a spotlight and a contextualization, not a threat,” the elected official’s team further contested.
