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.
Mr. Ramadan was accused of raping the woman, a Swiss convert to Islam, and of subjecting her to brutal sexual acts in a Geneva hotel room in 2008. The plaintiff — who has not been publicly identified — filed her police complaint in 2018 after similar accusations against Mr. Ramadan came to light in France.
After the initial acquittal, the trial on appeal was held in May.
Mr. Ramadan had acknowledged that he and the plaintiff had kissed but said that he had rebuffed her advances and that she had falsely accused him to get revenge, according to the appeals court’s ruling.
But the judges “found that several testimonies, certificates, medical notes and private expert opinions were consistent with the facts reported by the plaintiff,” the Geneva Court of Justice said in its statement, which added, “The evidence gathered by the investigation thus convinced the chamber of the defendant’s guilt.”
Robert Assaël and Véronique Fontana, the Swiss plaintiff’s lawyers, said that the ruling “sweeps aside all the unrealistic arguments put forward by the defendant, who never ceased to smear and discredit the victim, in order to preserve his already tarnished image.”
“Our client is relieved, of course, and knows what she had to endure for the truth to come out,” they said in a statement on Tuesday.
Mr. Ramadan’s legal troubles are far from over. In June, he was ordered to face charges in Paris that he raped three women between 2009 and 2016; he has appealed that order to make him stand trial.
Mr. Ramadan is a grandson of Hassan al-Banna, who founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the 1920s. Mr. Ramadan is the author of several books on Islam and on the Western world and was formerly a professor of contemporary Islamic studies at the University of Oxford.
He gained a widespread following for offering what some considered a moderate, tolerant version of Islam. But critics, especially in France, have accused him of hiding radical views behind a polished media persona.
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