It is an emblematic case of the time of #MeToo. A figure of European Islam, Tariq Ramadan has gone through the French judicial system on charges of rape and sexual harassment. It is now in Switzerland, his country, that the Islamologist must face justice. This Monday, his trial is held in Geneva before a criminal court where he is to be tried for "rape and sexual coercion" in a case dating back nearly 15 years and which he denies.

The Swiss plaintiff, who says she lives under threat and therefore wishes to be called by the assumed name of "Brigitte", was in her forties at the time of the facts. She claims that the Islamologist subjected her to brutal sexual acts accompanied by beatings and insults on the evening of October 28, 2008, in a hotel room in Geneva. According to the indictment, he was guilty of "rape three times" during the same night and "sexual coercion" to the point of suffocating her. "I have rarely seen a case so steeped in threats and fear," said the plaintiff's French lawyer, François Zimeray, a former diplomat and human rights expert.

The intellectual faces between 2 and ten years in prison

Tariq Ramadan, now 60 and threatened with a France trial for similar offences, admitted to having met her but claimed during the investigation to have given up having sex with her. The Swiss intellectual, a charismatic and contested figure in European Islam, faces between 2 and ten years in prison. Contacted by AFP, one of his French lawyers, Philippe Ohayon, declined to comment before the highly anticipated trial, which is expected to last two to three days.

The judgment will be pronounced on May 24, said the Geneva justice. Tariq Ramadan will be able to appeal. Doctor of the University of Geneva where he wrote a thesis on the founder of the Egyptian Islamist brotherhood of the Muslim Brotherhood who was his grandfather, Tariq Ramadan was professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom until November 2017 and invited to many universities in Morocco, Malaysia, Japan or Qatar.

Suspected of raping four women in France

Popular in conservative Muslim circles, he remains contested, especially by supporters of secularism who see him as a supporter of political Islam. In France, he is suspected of raping four women between 2009 and 2016, a case that triggered his downfall in 2017. In July, the Paris prosecutor's office requested that he be referred to the Assizes and it is up to the investigating judges in charge of the investigations to order a trial or not.

The French case earned him more than nine months of pre-trial detention in 2018, from which he was released in November of the same year. It has remained under judicial control ever since. Tariq Ramadan is required to reside in France but he has exceptional permits to leave French territory to travel to Switzerland in connection with the case heard this week in Geneva.

  • Justice
  • Tariq ramadan
  • Switzerland
  • Geneva
  • Rape
  • Sexual violence
  • Violence against women