French President Emmanuel Macron said today that Algeria was "dishonoring itself" by not releasing the French-Algerian writer Boualem Sansal, who was arrested in mid-November in Algiers.
"Algeria, which we love so much and with which we share so many children and so many stories, is being dishonored by preventing a seriously ill man from receiving treatment. It is not worthy of what it is," Macron said during the annual meeting with French ambassadors at the Elysee Palace to define the main lines of Paris' foreign policy.
"And we, who love the Algerian people and their history, call on their government to release Boualem Sansal," he added, insisting that the "freedom fighter" is "detained in a completely arbitrary manner by the Algerian authorities."
A critic of the Algerian authorities, Boualem Sansal, 75, has been in prison since mid-November, accused of endangering state security. The French-Algerian writer has been in a treatment unit since mid-December.
Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune first mentioned his arrest on 29 December, describing him as an "impostor" sent by France.
The author of "2084: The End of the World", who became a French citizen in 2024, is being prosecuted under Article 87 of the Algerian penal code, which punishes "as a terrorist or subversive act any act that targets the security of the State, territorial integrity, stability and the normal functioning of institutions".
According to the French daily Le Monde, the authorities in Algiers took a dim view of Sansal's statements to the French far-right media outlet Frontières, which defended Morocco's position that the country's territory had been truncated during French colonisation in favour of Algeria.
The writer's arrest comes on top of a new crisis between Paris and Algiers, which began in July with Emmanuel Macron's decision to "recognise Western Sahara as part of Moroccan sovereignty".
The former Spanish colony of Western Sahara, considered a "non-self-governing territory" by the UN, has been in the midst of a conflict for half a century between Morocco and the Sahrawi liberation movement, represented by the Polisario Front, supported by Algiers.
