FRANCE:A year after the "Muhammad cartoons" led to rioting and some 50 deaths throughout the Muslim world, Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical magazine that published cartoons from the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten and added some of its own, will go on trial today for "public insult towards a group of people because of their religion".
"This trial is medieval, medieval ..." Philippe Vals, the magazine's editor said at a press conference yesterday. "Democracy constantly updates itself by criticising religious dogma; if we're no longer allowed to criticise religion, we are no longer in a true democracy."
Dalil Boubakeur, the rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris and head of the French Muslim Council (CFCM), joined the more radical Union of Islamic organisations in France (UOIF) in filing the lawsuit against Charlie Hebdo last summer.
Mr Boubakeur says that Jewish groups file suits every time anti-Semitic material appears in the French media and that from now on Muslims will do the same.
Three cartoons have been singled out as insulting. Two drawings first appeared in Jyllands-Posten. One shows the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb in his turban. Another shows the Prophet holding back would-be suicide-bombers with the words "Stop. We've run out of virgins." (Suicide bombers are allegedly promised 40 virgins on arrival in paradise.) The third cartoon, by the French cartoonist Cabu for Charlie Hebdo, shows Muhammad cringing with his hands over his eyes, saying "It's hard to be loved by assholes."
Vals claimed the caption on the last drawing, "Muhammad overwhelmed by the fundamentalists", proved the magazine was criticising fundamentalist terrorists, not ordinary Muslims. Flemming Rose, the cultural editor at Jyllands-Posten who first commissioned the cartoons, will take the witness stand in defence of Charlie Hebdo today. "I and my newspaper very much identify with this case. We will do everything in our power to support it," he said.
Eleven Muslim groups attempted to press criminal charges against Jyllands-Posten in Denmark, but the state prosecutor threw the case out, Rose said. The same organisations then filed a civil suit for slander, which the newspaper won last autumn. The French case is the only one to come to trial outside Denmark.
The Danish decision stressed that the cartoons were in the public interest, Rose said. He nonetheless received death threats. The newspaper offices had to be evacuated twice and the cartoonists went into hiding.
"I cannot imagine the consequences, not only for France but for Europe, if Charlie Hebdo loses this case," Rose said. "It would turn the clocks back decades, if not ages."
The Danish editor said taboos against insulting Muslims reminded him of being a reporter in the former Soviet Union. "This goes to the heart of what European civilisation is about: free speech and the right to challenge any authority," he said.
Francis Szpiner, the lawyer for the Muslim groups, is asking for a fine of €22,000 and six months in prison for Philippe Val. The real danger, says Caroline Fourest, a fervently anti-Islamist essayist who writes for Charlie Hebdo, is that "if we lose, we'll be branded a racist newspaper. Every time we publish a drawing that criticises religion, the case will be cited as jurisprudence."
The left-wing newspaper Libération will publish a joint edition with Charlie Hebdo today to mark the beginning of the two-day trial. The verdict will be handed down in four to six weeks.
On Monday, Libération published a declaration of support signed by a host of militant secularists, among them three members of the Académie française and three minor presidential candidates.
Two and a half months before the French presidential election, the trial has political undertones, with President Jacques Chirac appearing to support the Muslim plantiffs, while left-wing and centrist politicians defend Charlie Hebdo.
Mr Szpiner, the Muslims' lawyer, is also Mr Chirac's lawyer and Val, Charlie Hebdo's editor, has implied there is a conspiracy behind the trial. The case should not have reached court until May or June, after the elections. The judges of the 17th chamber, who usually hear press cases, were replaced by the high court judge Jean-Claude Magendie, who in 2005 convicted a clothing company of offending Christians by using a version of The Last Supper in an advertisement. That verdict was reversed by the supreme court last November.