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Marine Le Pen Faces Prosecution Over Islamic State Tweets, Says It Violates Her Freedom Of Expression
Marine Le Pen: Sylvain Lefevre/GettyImages)
French leader Marine Le Pen is being charged for “circulating violent messages” over a series of tweets about the Islamic State (IS), reports AFP. The move to charge her by a judge in Nanterre – outside Paris – comes months after the National Assembly voted to strip her of her parliamentary immunity in November over the same three tweets that was posted in 2015.
If found guilty of sharing “violent messages that incite terrorism or pornography or seriously harm human dignity”, Le Pen stares at a €75,000 ($91,000) fine and three years in prison.
The pictures were originally posted weeks after terrorists attacked Paris in 2015, killing 150 people. One of the pictures showed the body of slain American journalist James Foley who had been beheaded by the IS. The picture was later deleted after a request from Foley’s family. Captioned “Daesh is this!”, the other two pictures showed a man being run over a tank and a man being burnt alive in a cage.
Terming it a violation of her freedom of expression and denouncing it as a lowly, political move, Le Pen said that she would have got a medal for what she did in other countries.
In September, the Assembly had taken away parliamentary immunity from another member of Le Pen’s National Front over similar pictures being tweeted out.
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