A Swiss court has handed a 60-day jail sentence to French-Swiss writer and commentator Alain Bonnet, known as Alain Soral, for defamation, discrimination, and incitement to hatred.
Soral’s conviction stems from a Facebook video , in which he criticized Swiss journalist Catherine Macherel, referring to her as a “fat lesbian,” Fox news reported.
Muriel Waeger, co-director of a lesbian activist group said “The conviction of Alain Soral is a strong signal that homophobic hatred cannot be tolerated in our society.”
Soral’s lawyer, Pascal Junod, derided the conviction as a “crime of opinion,” suggesting that it aimed to probe whether individuals had “sinned against the dogmas of single thought.”
The report also noted that Soral intends to appeal the decision to the Swiss federal court and, if necessary, to the European Court of Human Rights.
This is not Soral’s first encounter with legal trouble related to his statements. Previously, he faced multiple convictions in France for Holocaust denial, which is considered a crime in that country. In 2019, he was sentenced to jail time for his Holocaust denial activities, the report by Fox news said.