Ban on rapper Freeze Corleone's concerts lifted by court

The two concerts of the controversial rapper Freeze Corleone at the Zénith in Paris, which had been banned by the police headquarters for accusations of anti-Semitism, will finally be able to take place on Friday and Saturday, the courts have decided. Seized in summary proceedings by the rapper, the Paris administrative court ruled on Friday that the decisions of the police headquarters posed “a serious and manifestly illegal attack on freedom of expression and assembly”. He therefore suspended the order taken Tuesday by the prefect of police Laurent Nuñez.

The police headquarters had forbidden Freeze Corleone from participating in the first concert on Friday, given by the 667 collective of which he is the founder, and had banned the second Saturday, scheduled in his own name. “The risk of committing an offense likely to undermine respect for the dignity of the human person (...) and cause a disturbance to public order has not been demonstrated,” ruled the administrative court. To justify the ban, the police headquarters argued that the rapper's texts contained "numerous conspiratorial and anti-Semitic references", and that his concerts took place "in a particularly tense geopolitical context" due to the war between Israel and Hamas. .

Also read “Prevent the spread of anti-Semitic hatred”: an elected official calls for a ban on the Freeze Corleone concert in Nantes

The administrative court objected that “texts containing passages of an anti-Semitic nature do not appear on the concert program” for Friday and Saturday. “The investigation carried out on this subject following a report in 2020 was closed without further action,” he continues in his decision. It also notes that “the concert, recently given by the artist in Foirac, which includes a program of songs identical to that planned for the concerts of November 24 and 25, 2023, did not give rise to any disturbance to public order , nor for that matter his previous concerts.

In March, the Council of State had already rejected the appeal from the city of Rennes which wanted to ban the 31-year-old rapper from performing. A prominent figure in French rap, Freeze Corleone (real name Issa Lorenzo Diakhaté) was released in September 2020 by his label Universal Music, which denounced “unacceptable racist comments”.