This is a serious legal setback for the man who thought it was a good idea to gift his three-year-old nephew a T-shirt with the inscriptions “I am a bomb” and “Jihad, born on 9/11”. The newspaper Le Point reminds us of September 25, 2012, in Sorgues (Vaucluse), when a three-year-old boy came to school wearing this questionable T-shirt. The headmistress was upset and filed a complaint with the school inspectorate and the mayor of the town, who referred the matter to the public prosecutor’s office. The boy’s mother and the uncle who had provided the garment were acquitted by the criminal court in Avignon, but the court of appeal in Nîmes sentenced them to a suspended prison sentence of one month and a fine of 2,000 euros for the mother and a suspended prison sentence of two months and a fine of 4,000 euros for the uncle.
The uncle had appealed to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) to contest the ruling. However, the court ruled on Thursday that his conviction by the French authorities was valid. “Before the national authorities and before the European Court, the applicant argued that the disputed inscriptions were humorous,” the Strasbourg court said. However, the Court recalled that while “humorous expressions or expressions cultivating humour are protected by Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights” (which protects freedom of expression), they are not exempt from the limits set out in that paragraph. “Indeed, the right to humour does not allow for everything, and those who exercise freedom of expression take on duties and responsibilities. “The Council of Europe’s legal branch also notes that while 11 years passed since the attacks of 9/11, these incidents “took place only a few months after other terrorist attacks that killed three children in a school”, the Ozar Hatorah Jewish school in Toulouse.The fact that the appellant has no connection with a terrorist movement “cannot weaken the significance of the problematic message”, stresses the ECtHR, deploring “the instrumentalisation of a three-year-old child who is unwittingly the carrier of the disputed message”. As Le Point explains, the European Court considers that “the reasons based on combating the apology of violence committed by the applicant, put forward by the national judges in order to convict him, appear both relevant and sufficient to justify the legal act in question”. There was therefore no violation of Article 10 of the Convention, the Court ruled.