Aged 60, the intellectual, who denies the charges of “rape and sexual coercion”, is also threatened with a trial at the assizes in France for similar facts.
Tariq Ramadan facing justice. The Swiss Islamologist will appear on Monday before a criminal court in Geneva for “rape and sexual coercion”, which he denies en bloc.
The Swiss complainant, who says she lives under threat and therefore wishes to be called under the assumed name “Brigitte”, was in her forties at the time of the events, which date back almost 15 years. She assures that the Islamologist subjected her to brutal sexual acts accompanied by beatings and insults, on the evening of October 28, 2008, in a hotel room in Geneva.
Verdict May 24
60 years old today and threatened with a lawsuit in France for similar facts, Tariq Ramadan admitted having met her, but affirmed during the investigation to have given up having a sexual relationship with her.
The Swiss intellectual, charismatic and contested figure of European Islam, faces between two and ten years in prison. Reached by AFP, one of his French lawyers, Me Philippe Ohayon, refused to comment before this highly anticipated trial, which should last two to three days.
The judgment will be pronounced on May 24, Geneva justice told AFP. Tariq Ramadan will be able to appeal.
Returned to the assizes in France?
Doctor of the University of Geneva where he wrote a thesis on the founder of the Egyptian Islamist brotherhood of the Muslim Brotherhood who was his grandfather, Tariq Ramadan was professor of contemporary Islamic studies at the University of Oxford in the United United until November 2017 and invited many universities in Morocco, Malaysia, Japan or Qatar. Popular in conservative Muslim circles, he remains contested, in particular by secularists who see him as a supporter of political Islam.
In France, he is suspected of rape committed between 2009 and 2016 on four women, a case which triggered his fall in 2017. The Paris prosecutor’s office requested his referral to the assizes in July and it is up to the investigating judges responsible for the investigations to order a trial or not.
The French file earned him more than nine months of pre-trial detention in 2018 from which he emerged free in November of the same year. He has remained under judicial supervision ever since.
Tariq Ramadan is required to reside in France but he benefits from exceptional authorizations to leave French territory to go to Switzerland in the context of the case judged this week in Geneva.
Intimate correspondence
Converted to Islam, “Brigitte” indicated during the investigation that she had met him at a book signing, a few months before the night of October 28, 2008, then at a conference in September.
There followed an increasingly intimate correspondence on social networks. On the evening of the events, she joined him in the hotel where he was staying in Geneva. It is in his room that, for hours, he would have forced her to sexual acts, with violence, according to “Brigitte”, who is a civil party.
According to the indictment, he was guilty of “rape three times” during the same night and “sexual coercion”, to the point of suffocating her. The Islamologist disputes these accusations.
“This trial for my client is an ordeal, not a therapy. She is waiting for recognition of the suffering that has accompanied her for 15 years and which she has made it a painful duty to reveal,” said AFP. his French lawyer François Zimeray, a former diplomat and human rights specialist.
“She expects a difficult, painful confrontation but she is ready for it, convinced that this fight is for her a duty as much as a test”, he added.
She filed a complaint with the Geneva courts in April 2018, a few months after the Swiss media published anonymous testimonies from young Geneva schoolgirls, according to which in the 1990s Tariq Ramadan would have tried to seduce one of them and would be managed to have sex with three others.
