A European court ordered France to pay restitution this month to a radical abortion activist who protested half-naked inside a Catholic church and then urinated on the floor, arguing that she was exercising her “freedom of expression.”
According to the Catholic News Agency, the European Court of Human Rights unanimously ruled in favor of abortion activist Eloïse Bouton in a decision published Oct. 13.
In December 2013, Bouton entered the La Madeleine Catholic Church in Paris, half naked with pro-abortion phrases painted across her body, and interrupted a Christmas rehearsal. According to local news reports, she walked up to the altar with a piece of animal liver, representing an unborn baby, and acted out an “abortion of Jesus” by the Virgin Mary. Then, she urinated on the floor, the report states.
The radical pro-abortion group Femen took credit for the stunt on Facebook.
French authorities convicted Bouton for public sexual acts and appeals courts upheld her conviction. However, the European high court overturned these rulings in its decision this month, arguing that France violated her free speech rights because her lewd acts were done “in the context of a political or public debate,” CNA reports.
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“In the present case, the sole purpose of the applicant’s action, for which no insulting or hateful conduct was alleged, was to contribute to the public debate on women’s rights,” the judges wrote.
They ordered France to pay Bouton 9,800 euros (about $9,584) for “moral damages” and legal expenses, according to the European Centre for Law and Justice, a pro-life legal NGO.
“In condemning France in the Femen case, the court said it was ‘struck by the severity of the penalty,’ which was only a one-month suspended prison sentence and a 2,000 [euro] fine,” the legal organization responded.
It slammed the ruling as a “sham” and accused the court of double standards, writing:
The Court speciously ruled that the protection of “freedom of conscience and religion” could not justify the conviction, and furthermore feigned to reproach the French courts for not having “examined whether the [Femen]’s action was ‘gratuitously offensive’ to religious beliefs, whether it was insulting or whether it incited disrespect or hatred towards the Catholic Church”. What a sham! …
In 2018, the ECHR upheld the criminal conviction of an Austrian lecturer who was accused of having equated Mohammed’s sexual relationship with Aisha, then only 9 years old, with “paedophilia”. The ECHR ruled that the lecturer had not sought to inform the public objectively but to “demonstrate that Muhammad is not worthy of worship”. In support of this conviction, the Court considered that to speak of “paedophile” would be a “generalisation without any factual basis”, “likely to arouse justified indignation” among Muslims. According to the Court, these remarks constituted “a malicious violation of the spirit of tolerance that underpins democratic society” and were likely to “stir up prejudice” and “endanger religious peace”.
Femen is a radical pro-abortion group known for its lewd protests across the world. Often, they protest naked in public, targeting churches, pro-lifers and elected officials.
