This Monday, Olivia Ronen, the lawyer for Salah Abdeslam, the “only living member of the commando” of the attacks of November 13, 2015, was on the set of Quotidien. She explained what her role was and defended her client. One sentence in particular did not fail to hold the attention of journalists present on the set, viewers and Internet users: “He is a very human person”.
The trial of the Paris attacks opened on September 8, 2021. The verdict will be delivered on June 29, following more than nine months of debate. This June 6, Yann Barthès received Olivia Ronen, the lawyer for Salah Abdeslam, whom the presenter of Daily life presented as the “only living member of the commando” of the attacks.
The French lawyer presented herself, as well as her colleague Marin Vettes, Abdeslam’s other lawyer, as the “lookouts from the bottom”. Together, they peeled and studied the “millions of pages” that make up the file. “There were things that were said for six years, six years during which Salah Abdeslam did not exercise his rights. We had to go through all that with a fresh eye, without received ideas, without prejudice, trying to get rid of everything we had been able to hear for six years”, she explains.
Olivia Ronen insists her client was never accompanied by a lawyer, so he was never told what was going on. Remember that Salah Abdeslam deliberately chose not to be represented, but the Parisian lawyer did not want to reveal the reasons that led his client to make this choice. “A few months before the trial, we had to talk to him regarding all this, tell him exactly what was in the file, and we had to build a defense,” she continues.
“Someone very human”
Me Ronen admits having hesitated before accepting Abdeslam’s request to be his lawyer. “It’s a decision with serious consequences, because it involves a defense like that. I didn’t hesitate very long, because I saw that there was something to do, that the contact was good. Contrary to all the ideas we might have had, he is a very human person.
This last sentence challenged the journalist Julien Bellver, who underlined the fact that it was difficult to hear someone defend Salah Abdeslam and call him a “human person”, when he was a member of a commando which left 130 dead and 413 injured, according to the official death toll. “I am once morest the ready-made ideas that come to say that a person is to be excluded from humanity, that he is a monster, someone inhuman”, replied Olivia Ronen. “The facts with which he is charged are, on the contrary, very human and that leads to understanding them, to thinking regarding them a little differently. When I say to understand them, that does not mean to justify them, to legitimize them. But it is also this job of the assize court to know what happened to get to this point.
Olivia Ronen says she is “proud to participate in this work of justice”, hopes that the “responsibilities will be justly recognized” and that the court decision will appease everyone.
“I didn’t hesitate for very long, I saw that the contact was good: he is a very human person, with whom we can discuss. »
Olivia Ronen talks regarding agreeing to defend Salah Abdeslam??
#Daily pic.twitter.com/YJWDAX2Rgb— Daily (@Qofficiel) June 6, 2022
Auteur: 7sur7.be – 7sur7.be
