A preliminary investigation was opened Tuesday in Paris after the complaint of two associations on a solicitation by SMS of the party of Éric Zemmour targeting French voters of Jewish faith on the eve of the first round of the presidential election, indicated Tuesday to 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. 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 from the UEJF and the association J’accuse AIJI, an investigation was opened today into the heads of detention, storage, recording, transmission of personal data outside the cases provided for by law, communication to a third party without authorization and diversion of the purposes of a personal data file”, specified the parquet floor. The investigations were entrusted to the Brigade for the repression of personal crime (BRDP), also indicated this source.
“Message from Éric Zemmour to French people of the Jewish faith”
The criminal code punishes by 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 “prohibited”, unless “the person concerned has given his explicit consent to the processing of this personal data for one or several specific purposes”.
The candidate’s message, now offline, was entitled: “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.
Set up using a personal data broker
Asked by BFMTV, Éric Zemmour’s team confirmed that they were behind the campaign to send “ten thousand SMS” which 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 are impatiently waiting for the police to do their job,” Stéphane Lilti, who filed a complaint for the Union of Jewish Students in France (UEJF), told AFP. His colleague Me Sacha Ghozlan, who filed a complaint for the “J’accuse” association, denounced on Twitter on Tuesday “the most massive exploitation of lists of names of Jews since the Vel’d’hiv roundup”.
I will intervene for @Jaccuse98686014 alongside my colleague Stéphane Lilti for @uejf in this legal proceeding against Eric Zemmour
“The most massive exploitation of lists of names of Jews since the Vel’d’hiv roundup”https://t.co/D9vIYZU7fm— Sacha Ghozlan (@SachaGhozlan) April 12, 2022