The ultra-right activist Yvan Benedetti was released on Thursday January 20 by the Paris Criminal Court after remarks contesting the genocide of the Jews during the Second World War during a parliamentary commission of inquiry in 2019.
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Yvan Benedetti, head of the small group Les Nationalistes, was neither present nor represented both at the hearing on November 5 and at the trial on Thursday.
Two deputies, Muriel Ressiguier and Adrien Morenas, then respectively president and rapporteur of the Commission of Inquiry into the fight against far-right groups in France, had reported to the courts the comments made by Yvan Benedetti during his hearing on April 25, 2019.
In camera hearing
"
History is revisionist by definition, but you use the term Holocaust denier, which is quite caricatural
," he said before judging "
very serious
" the work of Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson. The Paris public prosecutor's office had classified this report, considering that the debates were not public because the hearing was behind closed doors. But the International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism (Licra) had Yvan Benedetti cited before the 17th chamber of the criminal court for "
disputing a crime against humanity
". The court considered that Yvan Benedetti certainly had disputed in his remarks the crimes of which the Jews had been victims, but that it was not established that he had the will to make them public.He was therefore released.
Figure of the ultra-right, Yvan Benedetti was sentenced in June to a 100-day fine of 100 euros for having published in 2020, on the "
Jeune Nation
" site which he administers, a video of the far-right activist Hervé Lalin ( says Ryssen) entitled "
The Jews, Incest and Hysteria
".
A municipal councilor in Vénissieux, near Lyon, in the 2000s, he was expelled from the National Front for calling himself "
anti-Zionist, anti-Semitic and anti-Jewish
".
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In 2012, he took the helm of L'Œuvre française, a Pétainist movement founded in 1968 and dissolved after the death in June 2013 of anti-fascist activist Clément Méric during a fight with far-right skinheads.
Sentenced in 2019 to eight months in prison suspended for non-dissolution of this small group, he was also displayed among the "
yellow vests
".
Yvan Benedetti is to be tried on December 2, 2022 alongside Hervé Lalin for the attack on a team from the Quotidien program during a demonstration in 2019 against the opening of PMA (medically assisted procreation) to couples of lesbians and single women.
