The ruling of a French appeals court that the poisoning of a Jewish family by their Algerian nanny was not an act of antisemitism has shed light on what may be a wider phenomenon of the French legal system not recognizing Jew-hatred as an aggravating factor.
As previously covered by The Jerusalem Post in December 2025, an Algerian nanny was sentenced to two and a half years’ imprisonment for poisoning a French Jewish family for whom she was working.
The nanny, 42, made comments such as “because they have money and power, I should never have worked for a Jewish woman, she only brought me problems.”
On April 15, the Versailles Court of Appeal ruled that such remarks do not constitute antisemitic speech.
“This decision makes the judicial repression of antisemitism impossible and turns the text of laws, which are supposed to be protective, into mere meaningless scraps of paper. Faced with such a decision, litigants risk losing all forms of trust and protection from the judicial system,” said the family’s lawyers, Patrick Klugman and Sacha Ghozlan.
The recent ruling is not unique; the Post found five cases of antisemitism being excluded from rulings in the last five years.
Antisemitism being ignored in French courts
One example was in the Allouche v. France case of April 2024.
This involved a Jewish woman in France who received very serious, abusive emails from someone called “B.”, including insults, threats (like death or rape), and messages clearly targeting her because she is Jewish. She reported this to the police, who did prosecute B., but only for regular threats. The authorities ignored the antisemitic nature of the messages, even though it was obvious.
The victim took the case to the European Court, arguing that, under human rights law (especially Article 8 and Article 14 of the European Convention), the French government failed to protect her from discrimination and hate by not recognizing the antisemitic motive.
The European Court ruled that France violated her rights and ordered that she receive 15,000 euros in compensation.
Another example took place more recently, when a French appeals court acquitted Tunisian twin brothers of antisemitism charges after they cut down an olive tree planted to honor Ilan Halimi, a young French Jewish man tortured to death two decades ago.
During the trial, the brothers stated that they knew nothing about the ordeal of Halimi and did not speak or read French. They testified that it was pure chance that they cut down that particular tree, chosen among hundreds in the 3,120-square-meter Jardin d’Alcobendas.
The Paris Court of Appeal in March 2026 ruled that the crime was not motivated by antisemitism, which would have increased the punishments for the two brothers. The judges found no evidence that the assailants knew of Halimi’s identity or history or acted with the intent to target his memory because of his religious affiliation.
“While this act rightly shocked the Jewish community and French society as a whole, nothing establishes that the defendants knew the name and story of Ilan Halimi," said presiding judge Sylvia Fournier-Caillard.
Lawyer Alain Jakubowicz, representing LICRA, the Union of Jewish Students of France, and SOS Racisme, said he was “disappointed but not surprised.”
“Today, to establish the aggravating circumstance of antisemitism, you practically need a neo-Nazi with a swastika on his forehead, or an Islamist terrorist shouting ‘Allahu akbar’ while throwing an elderly person off a balcony. And even then, we’ve seen cases where that wasn’t enough.”
The twins were still convicted of vandalism and received prison sentences of around 8 months.
Jakubowicz was referring here to another case this year regarding the murder of a Jewish pensioner. In May 2022, Rachid Kheniche threw his neighbor, René Hadjadj, 89.
The magistrate of the public prosecutor’s office reportedly refused to consider Kheniche's prior antisemitic behavior, including social media posts promoting conspiracy theories about Jews, arguing that it was not directly related to the murder itself.
In February, the court convicted Kheniche of murder but rejected the antisemitic motive, concluding that Kheniche was mentally impaired at the time due to psychiatric issues.
This ruling was similar to the notorious case of the murder of French Jewish woman Sarah Halimi, 65, in 2017.
Kobili Traoré beat Halimi - no relation to Ilan - before throwing her out the window of her Paris apartment to cries of “Allahu akbar,” or God is great, and “I killed the devil.” Traoré claimed to have been troubled by Halimi’s mezuza, which “amplified the frantic outburst of hate,” and killed her in an antisemitic frenzy.
However, in 2021, a French court ruled that Traore could not stand trial because he was in a state of acute mental delirium brought on by cannabis consumption.
This sparked mass outrage in the Jewish community.
Francis Kalifat, the then president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France, said, “From now on in our country, we can torture and kill Jews with complete impunity.”
There have, of course, been some cases in which antisemitism has been included in the ruling as an aggravating factor.
In May 2024, four men from Bulgaria spray-painted red handprints on the walls of the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris. This is the memorial to Jewish victims of the Holocaust.
Two of the men actually carried out the vandalism and received 2-year prison sentences each. Two others were seen as the organizers (“brains”), and they received 3–4 years. All four were banned from France for life.
This came despite the fact that the men claimed they “didn’t know it was a Jewish memorial” and that the act was not antisemitic.
The court rejected the arguments.
Another case, not directly related, but significant, involved the ban on a rapper named Freeze Corleone from performing at a music festival in France (Eurockéennes) in July 2025.
The local government official banned Corleone just days before, citing the fact that some of his lyrics include antisemitic ideas, praise for terrorism, and references to Nazis and Hitler.
The festival organizers went to court to overturn the ban, arguing that it violated freedom of expression and that there was no real proof Corleone's concert would cause trouble.
France’s highest administrative court ultimately ruled that the ban was legal, saying that while freedom of expression is important, the risk of antisemitism and public disorder was serious enough to justify banning the concert.
All of the cases, including the ones where antisemitism was cited in the ruling, show that French courts have a very high bar for what is considered antisemitism.
In some, they are not necessarily saying there was no antisemitism, but rather that they cannot prove antisemitic intent beyond doubt in this specific case.
This, of course, causes significant upset in the Jewish community and to the victims and their families.
As Klugman and Ghozlan (of the Algerian nanny case) said, such rulings “make the judicial repression of antisemitism impossible," and as a consequence, Jewish victims have no protection.
The two lawyers have decided to appeal to the Court of Cassation. They also called on the Minister of Justice and the National School for the Judiciary to undertake a thorough review of initial and ongoing training for judges in the fight against racism and antisemitism.
Whether these five cases reflect a wider phenomenon of the French judicial system avoiding rulings of antisemitism is up for debate.
But the key question remains: if murdering Jews, destroying Jewish memorials, and poisoning Jewish families is not antisemitism, then what is?