Georges Ibrahim Abdallah must be released from prison, orders the sentence enforcement court

JUSTICE – He is one of the most famous prisoners in France. The most emblematic too. While he has been incarcerated in France since 1984 for his involvement in the deaths of two diplomats, Georges Ibrahim Abdallah saw his release ordered by the sentence enforcement court this Friday, November 15.

This while the Lebanese pro-Palestinian activist had been free for 25 years, but the French justice system had until now tirelessly opposed his release, making him a symbol for defenders of the Palestinian cause. At Agence France Presse, his lawyer, Maître Jean-Louis Chalanset, welcomed “a legal victory and a political victory”.

This was the Lebanese activist’s eleventh request for release. This conditional release will take effect “ from December 6 » and is “ subject to the condition of leaving the national territory and no longer appearing there », Specifies the National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor’s Office in a press release to AFP, the institution however explaining that it is appealing the court’s decision.

He was almost released in 2013

Already in 2013, Georges Ibrahim Abdallah almost regained his freedom. Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State of the United States, at that time notably asked Laurent Fabius, Minister of Foreign Affairs, in diplomatic cables revealed by WikiLeaks : “We hope that the French authorities can find another basis to challenge the legality of the decision. » But the Minister of the Interior at the time, Manuel Valls, did not implement the expulsion order to which the courts had conditioned the release of the man, now 73 years old.

As a reminder, the Lebanese man was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1986 for complicity in the assassination of two diplomats, an American and an Israeli. Since then, he has been imprisoned in the Lannemezan penitentiary center, in the Hautes-Pyrénées, and is considered, to use the words used by his supporters, as “the oldest prisoner in the world linked to the Middle East conflict”.

For the Human Rights League, the incarceration of Georges Abdallah is contrary to human rights.

At the beginning of the 1980s and while Lebanon was in the middle of a civil war, Georges Abdallah, a former schoolteacher, co-founded the Lebanese Revolutionary Armed Fractions (FARL), a small pro-Syrian and anti-Israeli Marxist group which claimed responsibility for five attacks, four of which were fatal, in 1981 and 1982 in France.