Jean-Marie Le Pen fined for Roma comment
The father of French far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen was ordered Monday to pay 5,000 euros ($5,300) after losing his appeal against a conviction for describing people from the Roma minority as smelly.
An appeals court in the southern city of Aix-en-Provence found Jean-Marie Le Pen, the 88-year-old founder of the National Front (FN) party, guilty of inciting hate and making racist and negationist statements with the comments at a press conference in Nice in 2013.
Le Pen said at the time: "It appears you have a problem with several hundred Roma who have an irritating and, let's say, smelly presence in this city."
It was the ninth time that Le Pen, who infamously repeatedly referred to the Holocaust as a "detail of history", has been convicted for such offences.
"I stick by these terms because it is what I think," Le Pen said at an earlier hearing.
"Jean-Marie Le Pen's words were extremely serious and an open call to hate and ethnic discrimination," said Sonny Phung of the anti-racism group SOS Racisme, which will receive 2,000 euros of Le Pen's fine.
The Roma minority largely come from Bulgaria and Romania, and are often stigmatised in France where they have been accused of being responsible for a rise in petty crime.
Le Pen was the runner-up in the 2002 presidential election that rocked the French political establishment.
In recent years, he has had a high-profile falling out with his daughter after she took over the reins of the party and has sought to purge it of its more extreme elements.
Marine Le Pen is currently forecast to win the first round of France's presidential election on April 23 but lose the all-important May 7 runoff to either centrist Emmanuel Macron or conservative Francois Fillon.
However, polls show she has significantly reduced the projected margin of defeat in the past two months.