A Swiss appeals court has convicted the prominent scholar of Islam Tariq Ramadan of rape, overturning a previous acquittal dating back to 2023.
Swiss broadcaster RTS reported that, at the end of August, the court ruled Ramadan must serve a three-year prison sentence – two of them suspended – for an assault that the accuser said took place in 2008.
He had originally been acquitted of the charges in May 2023.
Ramadan, 62, is a Swiss citizen and the grandson of Hassan al-Banna, the founder of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood.
He rose to prominence as an academic in the early 2000s, and in 2007 he became a professor of Islamic studies at St Antony’s College Oxford.
Ramadan challenged Muslim fundamentalists and encouraged dialogue between religions, but was accused by some critics of promoting political Islam.
For a time, he sat on a UK Foreign Office advisory group on freedom of religion.
Ramadan was initially accused of rape in 2017 by a French woman, and, when that case became public, more women came forward with claims that he had attacked them or made unwanted sexual advances.
One of them, a convert to Islam who has remained anonymous, said Ramadan raped her in a hotel room in Geneva in 2008 – the accusation which has now led to his conviction.
The accuser described the alleged attack in detail, saying she feared she would die. Ramadan admitted inviting her to his hotel room, but denied any form of violence.
By 2020, Ramadan was facing five charges of rape in total – four in France, and one in Switzerland – and had spent nine months in detention in France before being released on probation.
In June, a Paris court of appeals ruled that Ramadan should be tried for raping three women between 2009 and 2016. His team have appealed against that decision.
Ramadan has consistently denied all the charges against him.
His son, Sami, told the BBC in 2019 that the cases against his father were “motivated by other reasons, which we feel are political”.
Ramadan himself has called the accusations a “trap” and said they were politically motivated and designed to discredit him.
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