A top human rights court has ruled in favour of the “Femen” activist who simulated the abortion of Christ by the Blessed Virgin, on the altar of the Madelaine church in Paris in 2013.

The judgement was handed down by the European Court of Human Rights Thursday.

The case concerned the criminal conviction of the applicant, a feminist activist who at the time was a member of Femen, for acts of “sexual exposure” committed in a church during a “performance” by way of protest against the Catholic Church’s position on abortion. She had received a suspended prison sentence.

The Court found that the criminal sanction imposed on her had not sought to punish an attack on freedom of religion but rather the fact that she had bared her breasts in a public place, and that the interference with the applicant’s freedom of expression, in the form of a suspended prison sentence, had not been “necessary in a democratic society”.

Grégor Puppinck of the European Centre for Law and Justice said the court had once again sided with anti-Christian blasphemers.

“The Court speciously ruled that the protection of ‘freedom of conscience and religion’ could not justify the conviction, and furthermore feigned to reproach the French courts for not having ‘examined whether the [Femen]’s action was “gratuitously offensive” to religious beliefs, whether it was insulting or whether it incited disrespect or hatred towards the Catholic Church’”.