France: Rapper acquitted of libeling police

Rapper in France is acquitted of libeling the police - International Herald Tribune

"It all started in April 2002, when Hamé's group, La Rumeur, released its first album, and with it a magazine. Inside, the rapper had written an article accusing the police of acting with impunity in their treatment of immigrants and their descendants.


"The reports of the Interior Ministry will never acknowledge the hundreds of our brothers killed by the police without any of the murderers being held to account," wrote Hamé, now 32, whose parents came from Algeria in the 1950s.

"The reality is that living in our neighborhoods today means you have a greater chance of experiencing economic abandon, of psychological vulnerability, of discrimination in the job market, of unstable housing, of regular police humiliations," he wrote."