Three years after the murder of Thomas Perotto in Crépol, the justice system has finally recognized what sixteen witnesses had reported from day one: the racist nature of the attack. In the face of this belated recognition, institutional anti-racist organizations have nothing to say.
A Classification Wrested, Not Given
It took nearly three years of investigation for the judges to officially recognize the racist dimension of the murder of Thomas Perotto in Crépol. According to information reported by Valeurs actuelles, sixteen testimonies reported racist insults and threats at the time of the events. It was only on July 20 that the aggravating circumstance was finally retained—and not spontaneously by the magistrates.
The judicial mechanism deserves to be detailed:
- neither the prosecution, during the initial flagrante delicto investigation, deemed it useful to retain this classification;
- nor had the investigating judges integrated it when the judicial investigation was closed in May;
- it took the insistence of the civil parties’ lawyers to obtain this reversal, despite testimonies deemed consistent.
According to BFMTV, the aggravating circumstance retained explicitly targets an attack motivated by membership in the “white race” and the French nation—a rare criminal classification, the mere occurrence of which is enough to measure the gravity of the facts established by the judicial institution itself.
The Organized Silence of SOS Racisme
In this case, the absence is eloquent. No prominent anti-racist association has announced a civil party petition. SOS Racisme, whose statutory vocation this is, has published no press release since the magistrates’ decision and has initiated no legal action, according to findings by Valeurs actuelles.
The association’s only statement came from its president, Dominique Sopo, but not in the direction one might have expected. Questioned by Mediapart, he chose to contest the very notion of anti-white racism rather than welcome the judicial recognition of the facts. His position, as reported, can be summed up in one phrase:
« It is a notion that comes from the far right, and has no statistical reality. »
A statement that comes even as the justice system—and not an activist think tank—has just legally classified the facts in this way.
An Implicit Hierarchization of Victims
This institutional silence raises questions about how anti-racist intermediary bodies construct their framework for reading crimes. That the aggravating circumstance of racism is retained for victims designated as belonging to the country’s ethnic majority seems to move the case outside the natural scope of intervention of these organizations—whereas the same type of mobilization would, in an inverse configuration, have generated press releases, op-eds, and civil party petitions.
Media coverage follows a similar line. L’Humanité thus chooses to question “what the classification says—and does not say—about racism in France,” rather than treating the judicial recognition as an established fact calling for standard mobilization. An article in Valeurs actuelles also notes a clear political divide in the reactions: the right welcomes the judicial recognition, while the left remains silent.
This imbalance reveals an implicit logic:
- certain victims benefit from an almost automatic associative and media mobilization;
- others, in circumstances that are nevertheless legally classified in an identical manner, prompt neither press releases nor op-eds;
- the reaction of activist organizations seems dictated more by the identity of the victim than by the nature of the crime.
What This Costs Public Trust
This type of silence is not neutral for the institutions concerned. When subsidized organizations, whose stated mission is to fight all forms of racism without distinction, shrink from a judicial classification that they did not obtain themselves, the coherence of their mandate is called into question.
The discrepancy between the judicial finding—established after three years of investigation and based on sixteen testimonies—and the lack of reaction from associations fuels a broader feeling: that of a justice system that moves forward laboriously, while activist networks choose their battles based on criteria that escape the sole reality of the facts.
There remains a question that goes beyond the Crépol case alone: whether the organizations funded to embody the fight against racism are still able to fulfill this mission when the victim does not fit the narrative they have built.
