The first trial of Swiss Islamologist Tariq Ramadan is being held in Geneva from Monday before a criminal court where he is to be tried for “rape and sexual coercion” in a case dating back almost 15 years and which he denies.
The Swiss complainant, who says she lives under threat and therefore wishes to be called under the assumed name of “Brigitte”, was in her forties at the material time. 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.
“Rarely have I seen a case so steeped in threats and fear,” his French lawyer François Zimeray, a former diplomat and human rights specialist, told AFP.
Tariq Ramadan, 60 years old today and threatened with a lawsuit in France for similar facts, 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 2 and 10 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.
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 in July his referral to the assizes and it is up to the investigating judges in charge of 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.
They then went up to the Islamologist’s room to put up an iron and an ironing board. It was then that, for hours, he would have forced her to sexual acts, with violence, according to “Brigitte”, who filed a civil action.
According to the indictment, he was guilty of “rape three times” during the same night and “sexual coercion”, to the point of suffocation. The Islamologist disputes these accusations.
“This trial for my client is a test, not a therapy. She expects recognition of the suffering that has accompanied her for 15 years and that she has made it a painful duty to reveal, ”says Me Zimeray.
“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.