The Algerian Justice has rejected this Wednesday the release of the Franco-Algerian writer Boualem Sansal, detained since mid-November on accusations of terrorism and subversion against the State.
The Court of Appeal of Algiers has denied the request for release presented by his three Algerian lawyers appointed by the Bar Association of the capital, reported a source close to the case cited by the French newspaper ‘Le Figaro’.
The novelist and essayist of dual nationality will remain in prison, a decision that the same source has related to the “excessive commotion” that the accusation has generated in France. «That doesn’t help Boualem Sansal. On the contrary, it is putting those who have the power to decide a little more tense,” he noted.
In fact, the French Foreign Minister, Jean-Noel Barrot, has called Sansal’s arrest “unacceptable”lacking “foundation.” “None of his activities allow us to prove the accusations that led to his imprisonment,” he said in an interview given at the end of November to the France Info television network.
The lawyer François Zimeray, appointed by the Sansal publishing housedenounced on Monday on his X social network account that he had not been “authorized to travel to Algeria to prepare his defense together with Algerian lawyers.”
Publications on the western territory of Algeria
The case would be related, according to the digital newspaper TSA Algérie, with an article published at the beginning of October in a far-right French media in which Sansal explained that Part of the western territory of Algeria “belonged to Morocco” before French colonization.
Sansal has been charged under article 87 of the Penal Code, which includes “terrorist or subversive acts against the security of the State, the integrity of the territory and the stability and normal functioning of the institutions”, for which the writer faces a possible sentence of life imprisonment.
Relations between Algeria and France are not going through a good moment since Paris recognized Moroccan sovereignty over the territory of Western Sahara, a step that even led Algiers to lower diplomatic relations to the level of chargé d’affaires and withdraw its ambassador in retaliation.
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