Armand Clesse: Hunting opponent symbolically convicted
Political scientist and animal rights activist Armand Clesse (70) must pay one euro each in damages to two recreational hunters in Luxembourg who had taken him to court for defamation. This is in addition to a small fine. The trial brought by two recreational hunters against an animal rights activist ended on Friday at first instance with a fine of 100 euros. The
Political scientist and animal rights activist Armand Clesse (70) must pay one euro each in damages to two recreational hunters in Luxembourg who had taken him to court for defamation. This is in addition to a small fine.
The trial brought by two recreational hunters against an animal rights activist ended on Friday at first instance with a fine of 100 euros.
The former university professor and animal rights advocate Armand Clesse had, on 23 February 2019, in a RTL radio broadcast sharply criticised the recreational hunters and hunting: recreational hunters were barbaric and hunting was premeditated murder.
Two recreational hunters, Marc Glesener and Jean-Claude Hosch, considered themselves defamed and insulted by being portrayed as murderers – and therefore filed a private lawsuit. In it, they demanded Clesse's criminal conviction as well as damages of 2,500 euros each.
One euro each in damages
The criminal chamber of the Diekirch District Court only partially granted this on Friday. The judges convicted Armand Clesse of defamation and imposed a fine of 100 euros. In addition, Clesse must pay Hosch and Glesener damages of one euro each – and a total of 500 euros in court costs.
Although the first-instance judgment has yet to be published, the sentence suggests that the judges considered the offence of defamation to have been proven, but assessed the degree of culpability and the harm caused as extremely minor.
At the end of the trial, Armand Clesse and his lawyer Me Daniel Baulisch announced that they would be filing an appeal. “I am 70 years old. For the rest of my life, I will stand up for animals. The seventy-year-old, who described himself during the trial as the “lawyer for animals who have no voice,” has set himself the goal of taking the case all the way to Strasbourg. He intends to continue referring to recreational hunters as «animal killers». In the hope that one day an ethical revolution will take place and we will adopt a different attitude towards animals. He very much hopes to be able to take this trial — one he never sought, but which he sees as a landmark case for freedom of opinion and expression — all the way to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg.
More on the subject of recreational hunting: In the dossier Poaching and hunting crime in Switzerland we document cases, legal questions and recurring patterns. What the research says about this is shown by Hunting fact-checked: the state of research.
The position of IG Wild beim Wild: IG Wild beim Wild rejects recreational hunting. Our model is the canton of Geneva, which has managed without recreational hunting since 1974: without hunting seasons, without hunting dogs, without driven hunts, without high seats, without the animal cruelty and crime that go hand in hand with hunting season elsewhere. What has worked there for over fifty years disproves every position paper by JagdSchweiz. An association that bases its policy on claims it refutes in its own documents is not a professional organisation, but a factory for misinformation.
