Algeria: Mother of Jailed French Journalist Asks Algerian President for Pardon
The mother of jailed French journalist Christophe Gleizes wrote a letter to Algeria’s president requesting he pardon her son from his seven-year sentence on terror-related charges.
“I respectfully ask you to consider granting Christophe a pardon, so that he may regain his freedom and his family,” Sylvie Godard wrote in the letter to President Abdelmadjid Tebboune, dated 10 December.
Gleizes’s lawyers are also seeking a new trial with the country’s highest court.
A contributor to the French magazines So Foot and Society, Gleizes was convicted of “glorifying terrorism” in June.
An Algerian appeals court upheld his sentence this month, a decision his mother called “incomprehensible”.
Gleizes is currently France’s only journalist imprisoned abroad, according to French NGO Reporters Without Borders (RSF), and French President Emmanuel Macron has vowed to work towards his release.
Macron joins family’s push to free jailed French journalist in Algeria
He was arrested in May 2024 while travelling to northeastern Algeria’s Kabylia region to write about the country’s most decorated football club, Jeunesse Sportive de Kabylie.
In 2021, he met the head of the Movement for the Self-Determination of Kabylie (MAK), a foreign-based group designated a terrorist organisation by Algiers.
At this month’s appeal hearing, Gleizes said he did not know the MAK had been listed as a terrorist organisation, and asked the court’s forgiveness for his “journalistic mistakes”.
Algerian court increases jail time for French journalist convicted of ‘terrorism’
“Nowhere in any of his writings will you find any trace of statements hostile to Algeria and its people,” she wrote in her letter.
Diplomatic crisis
At the time of his arrest, Gleizes found himself caught in the midst of a diplomatic crisis between France and its former colony, marked in particular by the withdrawal of the two ambassadors and the reciprocal expulsions of diplomats.
Tensions escalated with France’s recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara in July 2024, where Algeria backs the pro-independence Polisario Front.
French-Algerian writer Boualem Sansal was arrested in Algiers and sentenced in March to five years in prison for making comments about Western Sahara that Algerian authorities said undermined the country’s territorial integrity.
He was freed last month after intense negotiations with Algeria by France and Germany.
By RFI website.
