General
Renowned Scholar of Islam Is Convicted of Rape in Switzerland
An appeals court in Geneva overturned a previous acquittal and found Tariq Ramadan guilty. He faces separate charges in France.
Tariq Ramadan, a prominent Swiss-born scholar of Islam, was found guilty on appeal of raping and sexually coercing a woman in Geneva in 2008, reversing a previous acquittal, the Swiss authorities said on Tuesday.
The Geneva Court of Justice said in a statement that Mr. Ramadan, 62, had been convicted by an appeals court and sentenced to three years in prison, with two of them suspended. The ruling, dated Aug. 28, overturned a lower court’s 2023 decision that had cleared Mr. Ramadan of all charges, the statement said.
It was the first rape conviction for Mr. Ramadan, a renowned Muslim philosopher and theologian who was once listed by Time magazine as one of the world’s most influential people but who experienced a rapid fall from grace in 2017 and 2018 after several women accused him of sexual assault in the early days of the #MeToo movement.
Mr. Ramadan has always denied the allegations and characterized them as part of a smear campaign against him.
His lawyers denounced the ruling on Tuesday, saying it represented “the conviction of a man, and not of fact.” They said that they would appeal the conviction before the Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland.
“We are confident that it will fully restore our client’s innocence, as the first judges did,” the lawyers, Yaël Hayat and Guerric Canonica, said in a statement.
