Far-right writer Soral avoids jail in Swiss defamation case

Far-right essayist Alain Soral was fined by a Swiss court on Friday for defamation after calling a journalist a "fat lesbian", but avoided the prison term requested by the prosecution.

The writer, a 64-year-old French-Swiss citizen living in the western Swiss city of Lausanne, had been sentenced in April by the regional attorney general to three months behind bars for "defamation, discrimination and incitement to hatred."

But after he contested the order by the attorney general, who in Switzerland can unilaterally imposes sentences of up to six months in prison, a Lausanne court judge, Malika Turki, reduced his conviction to just "defamation".

She ordered him to pay 9,000 Swiss francs ($9,700) in fines, damages and legal fees.

Alain Soral -- a pen name for the controversial writer whose real name is Alain Bonnet -- is free to appeal the decision to a regional court.

The ruling came after Soral appeared in an online video attacking Swiss journalist Cathy Macherel of the Tribune de Geneve newspaper, who had written an article about him in 2021.

Macherel had filed a complaint over the video, where Soral described her as a "fat lesbian activist for migrants" and as "queer" -- a word he said was synonymous with "degenerate".

During a one-day court hearing on Wednesday, Soral insisted that he harboured no "anti-gay hatred".

But he claimed that he had been "the target of a smear campaign, of harassment, especially by the Tribune de Geneve and the LGBTQ community" in Switzerland.

He said Macherel's article had been the last in a series "attacking me ever since I arrived in Lausanne" in 2019, and stressed the video should be seen as his "right to reply", while acknowledging that his tone was "too virulent".

Soral has already faced around 20 convictions in France, mainly over charges of incitement to hatred and defamation.