Today in France, you can poison Jewish children, make antisemitic comments and not get charged with a hate crime. That’s the outcome of the case against an Algerian woman identified only as Leila Y., who worked for a Jewish family in Nanterre, France.

The dead giveaway for the family was the strong chemical smell emanating from the children’s juice bottles. Thankfully, no one was harmed, but the family pressed charges.

The 42-year-old nanny confessed to pouring toilet cleaner into the children’s juice bottles and even the parents’ bottles of wine in a police interview. She also told investigators, unprompted, that “because they have money and power, I should never have worked for a Jewish woman, she only brought me problems.” Later, she claimed that she confessed under duress.

Leila Y. didn’t get away with attempted murder completely. She was convicted of attempted poisoning and lightly sentenced to just two and half years in prison. But antisemitism was dismissed as an aggravating circumstance — because she made the statement without a lawyer present, despite the court’s acknowledgement that the statement was indeed antisemitic.

The family appealed to a higher court, but things only got worse from there. Not only did the Versailles Court of Appeals uphold the lower court’s ruling, but it also said that the nanny’s antisemitic statement wasn’t even antisemitic.

The family’s lawyers, Patrick Klugman and Sacha Ghozlan, explained why the ruling was so nefarious:

“This decision makes the judicial repression of antisemitism impossible and turns the text of laws, which are supposed to be protective, into mere meaningless scraps of paper,” the lawyers said. “Faced with such a decision, litigants risk losing all forms of trust and protection from the judicial system.”

Indeed, the Versailles Court of Appeals has just made it harder to fight antisemitism in France, having robbed the word of all its meaning.