French Lawyer Fined, Faces Discipline, For Alleging Judicial Religious Bias Based On Jewish Name

Digital Journal reports that in Lyon, France last week, the Lyon Bar referred lawyer Alexis Dubruel for disciplinary proceedings after Dubruel sought disqualification of a judge because of the judge's Jewish name.  Dubruel, representing a grandmother seeking to obtain visitation rights to see her granddaughter, argued that Judge Albert Levy should be disqualified for lack of impartiality. According to Dubrel:

The presiding judge whose disqualification is sought has the surname "Levy". The "Papa" of the person in this case Miss X (...) had been prosecuted for the offence of taking away a minor under 18, is named Moses (Moïse). The first page of reference for the word "Lévy" on Wikipedia says that the word is, “according to tradition, the founder of the Jewish religion, Judaism, which is sometimes called, for this reason, Mosaic, that is to say, the religion of Moses. The materiality of these findings is incontestable.

The court denied Dubrel's motion and fined him 750 Euros. According to The Algemeiner, in an earlier hearing a client of Dubruel's felt she was unfairly treated and attributed it to Levy's bias in favor of a Jewish defendant. Judge Levy has previously been the subject of anti-Semitic attacks, including threats when he investigated the far-right Front National Party and his being placed under police protection when an Islamist group threatened him.