Following a call from an ultra-right website for the "elimination" of lawyers who signed an open letter against Rassemblement National (RN, far right), the Paris Bar Council has referred the matter to the prosecutor's office, Agence France-Presse (AFP) has learned from the bar president's entourage.
Around a hundred lawyers, mainly from the Paris and Caen bars, have signed an open letter published on Tuesday on the website of the magazine Marianne, entitled "Lawyers, we are forming a law brigade against the Rassemblement National."
"Faced with the risk that the Rassemblement National and its allies represent for our institutions in the parliamentary elections (...), let us make a promise to defend the law, our Constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights," they write in it.
On Wednesday, the website Réseau libre - Le Réseau des patriotes ("Free Network - The Patriots' Network") published what looked like a blog post entitled "(Very partial) list of lawyers to eliminate," listing the signatories of the letter, with an illustrative image of a guillotine. "These lawyers are already declaring that they will not respect the verdict of the ballot box in the event of an RN victory," it reads, calling for them to be sent to "to be sent to a ditch or a stadium."
"History is an eternal restart, we are publishing a list of lawyers to be eliminated, we are not formally identified, we will not be arrested, and we may be convicted, we don't give a damn!" it adds.
"Those who want the death of our freedoms always start by attacking lawyers. I will never let them do so," responded Justice Minister Eric Dupond-Moretti on X. "Democracy is threatened more than ever when lists of lawyers to be eliminated because they fulfill their duties are circulating. We will never tolerate these threats and will take all necessary action. Support to all threatened colleagues," tweeted the president of the Paris Bar, Pierre Hoffman. "To our knowledge, this is the first time in France that there has been an explicit call for the murder of lawyers," stressed the Criminal Lawyers Association (ADAP) on X.
The site appears to be hosted on the servers of TVS24, a hosting service used by many far-right movements, which claims to protect authors from censorship and the law by having its servers in Russia. TVS24, which Le Monde has found hosts a large number of far-right domain names, had, for example, been praised by Islamaphobic site Riposte Laïque ("Secular Response").