Resumen de France: : Presentation on television of satirical drawings showing a politician: Paris court of appeal upholds the right to caricature
On 2 April 2015, the Paris Court of Appeal overturned a judgment delivered last year which found that the director of the France Televisions publication and the presenter of the programme ‘On n’est pas couché’ had insulted the leader of the Front National party by presenting a number of satirical drawings of her on television (see IRIS 2014-6/19). The image at issue represented the “family tree of Marine le Pen”, and included a photograph of her at the centre of a tree, the four main branches of which formed a swastika. The image was presented to coincide with the publication of a book on the genealogy of a number of public figures, in a supposedly humorous sequence showing the family trees of François Hollande, Nicolas Sarkozy, Christine Boutin, and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, which were represented respectively by a rose bush, a bonsai tree, a cross, and a phallus. Thus each image embodied one particular characteristic which, even if it was not truthful, evoked the politician in question. In its judgment delivered on 22 May 2014, the Paris regional court (tribunal de grande instance - TGI) had found that humour was not a sufficient argument to cancel out the seriousness of the offensiveness or derision being expressed. The connection made between the name and image of Marine Le Pen and the swastika, a Nazi emblem, was manifestly offensive and its excessive nature went beyond the permissible limits of freedom of expression, even in the given context. The appellants called for the judgment to be overturned, claiming that in fact the limits of freedom of expression had not been exceeded.
