A French judge on Tuesday postponed the trial of a far-left lawmaker accused of receiving and publicizing the stolen documents of a Jewish community former leader.
The trial, which is set to open in October, concerns the actions of Sébastien Delogu, a lawmaker representing a Marseille-area constituency in the National Assembly, the French parliament’s lower house. The trial was set to open on Tuesday but postponed due to the defense’s request for additional time to research the evidence.
Delogu, an anti-Israeli campaigner for the French Unbowed party of Jean-Luc Melenchon, is said to have published in September 2024 personal documents stolen from Isidore Aragones, a former president of the Marseille branch of the CRIF umbrella group of French Jewish communities and organizations.
The case has received considerable coverage in national-circulation media in France amid high levels of antisemitic violence and due to Delogu’s record of staging anti-Israel provocations, which have made him well known.
On Sept. 19, employees of the firm that Aragones owns, Laser Propreté, which is responsible for sanitary services around the Saint-Charles train station in Marseille, staged a break-in at his office to protest funds they said they were owed. Aragones later complained that personal documents of his were stolen during the break-in.
Five days after the break-in, Delogu published online the contents of the documents. The documents, which have since been deleted from Instagram, referred to Aragones’s trips to Israel and Brazil, personal financial matters, planned work on a secondary residence, copies of invoices and correspondence and allegations regarding Aragones’s connections to what Delogu calls the “genocide” carried out by Israel in Gaza.
In addition to the criminal trial set to take place at the Marseille Correctional Tribunal, Aragones has sued Delogu in civil court for 750,000 euros ($866,000). Delogu has defended his actions, portraying them as those of a whistleblower.
Bruno Benjamin, the current president of the Marseille branch of CRIF, said that the case shows that “France is in a pitiful state when Delogu is one of its lawmakers from Marseille,” which is France’s second-largest city and the birthplace of the French national anthem.
Delogu himself “is a lightweight, a nobody, but he has a voter base in the projects, who resemble him, who willingly vote for him although he represents nothing, accomplishes nothing, but making noise,” Benjamin told JNS.
In June 2024, Delogu shared online a video that depicted Meyer Habib, a Jewish lawmaker in National Assembly, as a “pizza oven,” in what Delogu’s critics considered a reference to the Holocaust. The Nazis burned the bodies of murdered Jews in ovens, and antisemites in France often use the word to taunt Jewish people.
In May 2024, during a debate on Gaza and French policy regarding Palestine, Delogu waved a Palestinian flag in the National Assembly.
Aragone’s lawyer said in the lawsuit against Delogu that Aragones has been “living in fear” since the publication of the documents, which included addresses, itineraries and bank account details.
Most of the documented hate crimes targeting a religious group in France last year were against Jews, who make up 0.6% of the population, the French Interior Ministry said in February.
The ministry’s report of anti-religious hate crimes for 2025 counted 1,320 antisemitic cases out of 2,489 offences targeting all religious minorities.
The number of antisemitic incidents documented in 2025 is the third highest since 2000, smaller only than the tallies of 2024 and 2023 (1,570 cases and 1,676 cases, respectively). Antisemitic incidents spiked dramatically after Oct. 7, 2023. In 2022, the interior ministry documented 436 antisemitic incidents.
