Verdict at trial of French teacher’s beheading shows continuum between words and murder

Rarely was the verdict of a terrorist trial so eagerly awaited and scrutinized. Perhaps more than any other terrorist attack, the murder of Samuel Paty, who was decapitated on October 16, 2020, just a few meters from his school, has powerfully highlighted the fragilities and the strengths of a pillar of democracy: freedom of expression.

This fundamental right had been the theme of the class that ended up costing the history-geography teacher’s life. Yet it was also the right that one of the trial’s defendants, Islamist agitator Abdelhakim Sefrioui, had asserted in court, citing his “right” to be “shocked” by the cartoons of Muhammad shown in class by the teacher, whom he accused of having “insulted” the prophet.

At the end of seven weeks of debates, the special criminal court in Paris had to answer an unprecedented question in anti-terrorism matters: Should discourse that does not call for murder, though virulent, manipulative and militant, be judged as a terrorist offense when it has provoked a terror attack? More than any other, this verdict had been expected to reveal the anti-terrorist justice system’s capacity to tackle the evolutions of the jihadist threat, and the way it feeds on political Islamism.

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