National Front mayor Julian Sanchez emerged victorious in the struggle with six Muslim store owners who accused the local government of discrimination. The administrative court of Nimes denied shopkeepers of their request for 3,000 euros compensation after they were forced to close their stores on June 16 and 17.
The shop owners considered the bylaws “discriminatory,” but were unsuccessful in their lawsuit. In order to justify the closings during the trial, the FN mayor provided 2,000 signatures “by local residents, exhausted by whirring motors and brawls at nearby grocery stores open, generally, when one sleeps.”
After the trial the mayor revoked the bylaws and later replaced them with new ones prohibiting future openings at late hours of the night. An unjust decision, according to Abdallah Zekri, president of the National Observatory Against Islamophobia. Zekri denounced what he considered to be “a maneuver to avoid conviction before the administrative court.”
