France's interior minister Brice Hortefeux was fined €750 today after being found guilty of having made a racist remark to a young man of Arab origins during an informal political gathering last year.
Mr Hortefeux's lawyer said the minister, one of president Nicolas Sarkozy's oldest friends, would appeal against the ruling, in which he was also told to pay €2,000 in damages.
Mr Hortefeux, appointed immigration minister when Mr Sarkozy took office in 2007 and promoted to the powerful Interior Ministry in a cabinet reshuffle last year, was captured on video joking with party activists while having his photograph taken alongside another party member of Arab origins.
"Amine is a Catholic. He eats pork and drinks alcohol," says a woman in the crowd at the event in early September last year.
"Ah, well that won't do at all. He doesn't fit the prototype at all," Mr Hortefeux is then heard saying to much laughter.
Another voice in the crowd says, "He is one of us ... he is our little Arab." Mr Hortefeux then replies, "We always need one. It's when there are lots of them that there are problems."
The minister has consistently denied he was being racist and says his remarks concerned the number of photographs that were being taken of him with people from his own region in France.
The young party activist at the centre of the row had told Le Monde newspaper last year that he did not feel offended by Mr Hortefeux and government allies also rushed to his defence.
France has the largest Muslim community in Europe but has sometimes struggled to integrate its large immigrant population.
Reuters