French president Emmanuel Macron has called on Algeria to free Boualem Sansal, after the French-Algerian novelist was on Thursday sentenced to five years in prison and fined for allegedly undermining Algeria’s territorial integrity.
Sansal was arrested on 16 November at Algiers airport on arrival from Paris, after saying in an interview with a far-right French media outlet Frontières that France unfairly ceded Moroccan territory to Algeria during the colonial era.
In a brief statement read out on Thursday morning at a court in Dar El Beïda, in Algiers, Sansal was sentenced “to a five-year prison term” with a fine of 500,000 Algerian dinars (£2,880).
Sansal was prosecuted under article 87 of the Algerian penal code for undermining national unity, insulting an official body, undermining the national economy and possessing videos and publications that threaten national security and stability.
According to French media, Sansal told the court that “my comments or writings were simply a personal opinion, and I have the right to do so like any Algerian citizen”.
Prosecutors at the Algiers court had requested a 10-year prison sentence for the author, who has been diagnosed with cancer and spent some of his time in pre-trial detention in hospital.
Asked about the sentence at a press conference on Thursday, Macron said he hoped Algerian authorities would show “common sense and humanity” and “give [Sansal] back his freedom and allow him to be treated for the disease he is fighting.”
A former high-ranking government official who has criticised the rise of political Islam in Algeria, Sansal’s books have been banned in his home country since 2006, but are still widely read.
In an open letter published in French publication Le Point last November, prominent writers including Salman Rushdie, Orhan Pamuk, Annie Ernaux and Wole Soyinka called for Sansal’s release, saying his tragic case reflected an “alarming reality in Algeria, where freedom of expression is only a memory in the face of repression, imprisonments and the surveillance of the whole of society”.
Relations between Paris and Algiers have deteriorated sharply sinceMacron backed Moroccan sovereignty over the Western Sahara last year, a territory on the north-west coast of Africa that is the subject of a decades-long dispute.
In a speech to Algeria’s parliament in December, president Abdelmadjid Tebboune described Sansal as “an impostor who doesn’t know who he is, doesn’t know his father and has come to say that half of Algeria belongs to another state”.
Macron has previously dismissed the accusations against Sansal as “not serious”. On Thursday, a French foreign ministry spokesperson told reporters: “We deplore the sentencing of our fellow citizen Boualem Sansal to prison”.
The president of the Federation of European Publishers, Sonia Draga, said she was “appalled” by the sentence: “Boualem should be a free man; his only offence is to have spoken and written freely over all these years. He must be freed immediately”.
