A Paris court has sentenced prominent Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan to 18 years in jail for raping three women, two years after he was given a jail term for a separate rape offence in Switzerland. The French case unfolded in 2017, when two of the three women came forward during the Me Too campaign against sexual abuse and harassment.

Ramadan, a 63-year-old former professor of Islamic studies at St Antony’s College in Oxford, did not attend the trial in Paris, although he has always denied the charges. His lawyers said he was being treated in the Swiss city of Geneva for multiple sclerosis and condemned the trial as a farce. Judge Corinne Goetzmann told the court that a warrant had been issued for Ramadan’s arrest, but Switzerland does not have an extradition treaty with its neighbour.

The court ruled that the 18-year jail term was justified by the “extreme seriousness of the acts.” The judge stated, “Consenting to sex does not imply consenting to any sexual act whatsoever.” One of the three women involved, Henda Ayari, told reporters upon leaving court that the judges had believed her, and she spoke of “nine years of suffering and struggle” since first coming forward. In 2017, she told French TV that the scholar had “literally pounced on me like a wild animal” in a hotel room in 2012.

Ramadan has reacted to the sentence by calling for a “new trial, a trial with both parties present.” He told Le Parisien newspaper, “I will not let this decision stand,” insisting that his health prevented him from attending and that he would not have assembled a legal team if he did not intend to participate. Ramadan, the grandson of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna, has long claimed the allegations are part of a slander campaign and said he is the victim of a political bid “to remove a Muslim intellectual.” Given that he is now subject to an arrest warrant, it is difficult to see how a second trial could proceed without his agreement to pre-trial detention in France.

Source: www.bbc.com