Marine Le Pen loses EU immunity over graphic IS tweets
The European Parliament voted on Thursday to lift Marine Le Pen’s immunity from prosecution after she tweeted images of violence at the hands of the Islamic State armed group (IS).
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The European Parliament’s vote comes after its legal affairs committee had requested her immunity to be lifted on Tuesday.
Acting parliament speaker Dimitrios Papadimoulis has said that “a big majority” was in favour of lifting Le Pen’s immunity for “dissemination of violent images”.
Until Thursday’s vote Le Pen had been immune from prosecution due to her position as member of European Parliament (MEP).
Beheadings, dead bodies
Le Pen, the French presidential candidate representing the far-right National Front (FN) party, has been under investigation since 2015 for posting explicit pictures of dead bodies and people being killed by IS.
One of the images was of the decapitated body of US journalist James Foley, while others showed someone being driven over by a tank and a man on fire in a cage. The images were tweeted with the caption, “This is Daesh” (an Arabic acronym for IS).
Foley was captured in Syria in 2012 and beheaded in 2014. His parents have accused Le Pen of posting “shamelessly uncensored” images for political gain.
Le Pen, who has more than one million followers on Twitter, posted the images in response to a French journalist who had drawn a parallel between her FN party and IS radical militants.
Multiple investigations
Thursday’s vote only lifts Le Pen’s immunity in the case of disseminating violent images on Twitter.
It does not grant her immunity in a separate ongoing fraud investigation into whether the FN misused European Parliament funds.
Le Pen had already been summoned by a French judge over the tweet investigation, but she had refused to be questioned, citing her parliamentary immunity as an MEP.
Le Pen has been rising in the polls ahead of France’s presidential election in April, alongside centrist candidate Emmanuel Macron.
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