Mark O'Doherty

Healing France - Improving Peace, Prosperity and Human Rights in the French Republic Mark O'Doherty

Israel blasted on 20. April 2021 the ruling by France's highest court that the murderer of Sarah Halimi was not criminally responsible because he had smoked marijuana before the crime. "Sarah Halimi was murdered for clearly anti-Semitic motivations, for the sole reason that she was a Jew, " said Foreign Ministry spokesman Lior Hayat to the Times of Israel. "This was a despicable murder that harmed not only the victim herself and her family, but also the entire Jewish community's sense of security." "The way to confront anti-Semitism is through education, zero tolerance, and heavy punishment," Hayat continued. "This is not the message that the court's ruling conveys." Halimi, an Orthodox Jewish woman in her sixties, died in 2017 after being pushed out of the window of her Paris flat by neighbor Kobili Traore, who shouted "Allahu Akbar" ("God is great" in Arabic). But in a decision last Wednesday, the Court of Cassation's Supreme Court of Appeals upheld rulings by lower tribunals that Traore cannot stand trial because he was too high on marijuana to be criminally responsible for his actions. Traore, a heavy pot smoker, has been in psychiatric care since Halimi's death. The court said he committed the killing after succumbing to a "delirious fit" and was thus not responsible for his actions. French President Emanuel Macron expressed support on Sunday for the country's Jewish community and its efforts to bring Halimi's killer to trial. He said he would seek a change to laws to prevent such a case from happening again. In a rare and controversial critique of France's justice system, Macron said that taking drugs and "going crazy" should not take away criminal responsibility. Having criticized a lower court's insanity finding in January last year, drawing a sharp riposte from the country's top magistrates, Macron on Sunday expressed support for the battle to bring Traore to trial for the killing. Therefore it is very important that the French government - as well as the French judicial system - makes a greater effort to counteract and prevent rightwing-extremism, by enforcing a policy of zero tolerance toward anti-Semitism, and confronting anti-Semitism through education, zero tolerance and punishment; so that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) can be upheld in France.