For the last four months, Oxford professor Tariq Ramadan has been rotting in a French jail, like Jean Valjean. He stands accused of rape by several women who came forward during the #MeToo scandal. One says that in a hotel room in Paris in the spring of 2012, the world-renowned Swiss scholar of Islam “choked me so hard that I thought I was going to die”. Another has reportedly described “blows to the face and body, forced sodomy, rape with an object and various humiliations, including being dragged by the hair to the bathtub and urinated on”.
If Ramadan is guilty of these despicable acts, he must face the full weight of French law. But he must first be given the chance to defend himself. And there are grave concerns that he is not.
On 2 February police locked Ramadan up and denied him bail, despite their investigations then being only incipient. They insisted that if they let him go he might flee the country or coerce his accusers into dropping their charges.
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