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Attacks of November 13, 2015: who is Olivia Ronen, Salah Abdeslam's lawyer?

2021-09-08T12:59:51.111Z


"The more the noose tightens, the more our role is essential," said this young 31-year-old criminal who has already defended several defendants with a radicalized profile.


Olivia Ronen, 31, is the Parisian lawyer who has the heavy and delicate task of defending Salah Abdeslam, the main accused in the trial of the attacks of November 13, 2015 which left 130 dead and nearly 500 injured in Paris and St Denis.

Read alsoTrial of the attacks of November 13: who are the 20 accused?

"

I know it will not be easy,

" the lawyer told AFP a few days ago.

Since the opening of the hearing before the Special Assize Court of Paris, this Wednesday, September 8, all eyes are on his client: Salah Abdeslam, 31, the sole survivor of the commandos of the November 2015 attacks.

“First of all, I want to testify that there is no god apart from Allah and that Mohamed is his messenger,”

he said in his first words to the court on Wednesday, September 8.

A first contact in the summer of 2018

It was Salah Abdeslam who contacted Olivia Ronen during the summer of 2018 from Fleury-Mérogis prison, where he is being held under very high security.

"It was a huge surprise,"

says the penalist to the

Parisian

. The lawyer then went to the Fleury parlor in September 2018 to meet him, specifies

Le Parisien

.

"We discussed a lot, I thought there was something to do,"

said the lawyer to our colleagues.

“I like challenges, putting myself in danger (...) We do not defend a cause, but individuals. Even if sometimes we try to exclude someone from humanity, that person is just as much a part of it as we are ”

, she adds.

She believes that the role of the lawyer is essential when "

the noose tightens

".

A very distant profile from the tenor media of the Lille bar Frank Berton, once the lawyer of Salah Abdeslam, Olivia Ronen was officially appointed last November.

But the one who repeats that she does not want to "

attract the light

" was

careful not

to advertise it, and had postponed as much as possible the moment when she would find herself in the spotlight of the media.

Before the opening of the trial, the lawyer did not wish to express herself on the state of mind of Salah Abdeslam or on the way in which he intends to approach the hearing, he who remained silent for years.

A "

great worker

"

Slender and elegant silhouette, black hair in a high bun on the head, Olivia Ronen is unknown to the general public but not in the profession. When she puts on her black dress, she has "

a very great force of conviction

", an "

incredible

"

energy

, assures her colleague Me Fanny Vial, also in defense in the November 13 trial. Her colleagues describe her jumbled together as

"brilliant"

,

"precocious"

,

"hardworking"

, "

extremely demanding with herself

", "

discreet

" or even

"ultra-efficient"

.

Born in 1990, Olivia Ronen grew up in Paris. His father is a business leader. Her mother, an official at the Ministry of Finance, quickly stopped working to raise her four daughters. She did ten years of classical dance then theater "

up to eight hours a week

", oriented towards literary studies before branching off to law school and bar school. The criminal law is "

obvious

" and she is fighting "

like crazy

" to obtain an internship with the famous criminal lawyer Thierry Lévy (who died in 2017).

She was sworn in in 2016 and was elected secretary of the conference - these young lawyers from the Paris bar elected for one year after an eloquence competition to, in particular, be appointed ex officio in assize cases. . She thus inherits business from foiled small attacks, defends Erwan Guillard, a former soldier who went to jihad in Syria.

The lawyer confides that she was marked by a "

feeling of powerlessness

" when one of her clients, involved in the Nice bombings but who challenged the terrorist qualification of the prosecution, committed suicide in prison in 2019. A fight in which she is sensitive, she who wrote her thesis on "

the place of prison in the fight against recidivism

". She has already intervened for the benefit of radicalized young people, but also members of the far-right movement.

Olivia Ronen likes to work alone, opened her firm solo but called on a colleague of her generation to help her defend Salah Abdeslam: Martin Vettes, 32, with whom she has already worked on several cases. 'sitting. With our “

five years at the bar

” each, says Me Vettes for his part, “

we are approaching this trial with humility

”. “

How this 'extraordinary' trial will go, nobody knows. We're going there, not with certainties, but with determination

”.

Source: lefigaro

All news articles on 2021-09-08

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