A preliminary investigation was opened Tuesday April 12 in Paris after the complaint of two associations on a canvassing by SMS of the party of Éric Zemmour targeting French voters of the Jewish faith on the eve of the first round of the presidential election, indicated Tuesday to the ‘AFP a source familiar with the matter. Requested by AFP, the Paris prosecutor’s office confirmed the opening of this investigation for offenses relating to personal data.
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An SMS signed with the name of the candidate was sent Friday to many mobile phones in France referring to a page published by the party Reconquest! displaying a text explicitly addressed to French Jews. “Following a complaint by the UEJF and the association J’accuse AIJI, an investigation was opened today into the charges of detention, storage, recording, transmission of personal data outside the cases provided for by law, communication to a third parties without authorization and misuse of the purposes of a personal data file“, said the prosecution.
“Message from Eric Zemmour to French people of the Jewish faith”
The investigations were entrusted to the Brigade for the repression of personal crime (BRDP), also indicated this source. The Penal Code punishes with five years’ imprisonment and a fine of 300,000 euros the creation of a file showing religious beliefs or racial or ethnic origins without the consent of the person concerned. The National Commission for Computing and Liberties (Cnil) had already opened an investigation following this canvassing.
The CNIL stipulates that “the processing of personal data which reveals (…) religious beliefs” is “forbidden“, unless “the data subject has given explicit consent to the processing of such personal data for one or more specific purposes“. The post from the contestant, now offline, was titled: “Message from Éric Zemmour to French people of the Jewish faith“. The far-right polemicist, who won 7% of the vote on Sunday, presented himself as “the only one to denounce the expansion of Islam which is ravaging our country“. “The anti-Semitism that kills today is Islamic“, he added.
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Asked by BFMTV, Éric Zemmour’s team had confirmed that they were behind the sending campaign “of ten thousand text messageswhich linked to the candidate’s web page. One of the leaders of the Reconquest campaign had assured the news channel that this political canvassing had been set up with the help of a personal data broker, who buys databases to trade in them. “We wait impatiently for the police to do their job.“, told AFP Me Stéphane Lilti, who filed a complaint for the Union of Jewish Students of France (UEJF). His colleague Me Sacha Ghozlan, who filed a complaint for the association “I accuse“, denounced on Twitter Tuesday “the most massive exploitation of lists of names of Jews since the roundup of the Vél’ d’Hiv“.
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