ALGIERS: French journalist Christophe Gleizes, sentenced to seven years behind bars in Algeria on terror-related charges, has filed an appeal seeking a new trial with the country’s highest court, his lawyers said Sunday.
“Christophe Gleizes registered an appeal at (the court of) Cassation” on Sunday, the deadline for filing, his French lawyer Emmanuel Daoud told AFP in a message, declining to comment further.
Gleizes’ Algerian lawyer Amirouche Bakouri made a similar announcement on Facebook.
Earlier this month, an Algerian appeals court upheld the seven-year prison term for the sportswriter, who was first convicted of “glorifying terrorism” in June.
Gleizes was arrested in May 2024 after traveling to Tizi Ouzou in northeastern Algeria’s Kabylia region — home to the Amazigh Kabyle people — to write about the country’s most decorated football club, Jeunesse Sportive de Kabylie.
In 2021, he had met in Paris with the head of the Movement for the Self-Determination of Kabylie (MAK), a foreign-based group designated a terrorist organization by Algiers earlier that year.
At this month’s appeal hearing, Gleizes had said he did not know the MAK had been listed as a terrorist organization, and asked the court’s forgiveness for his “journalistic mistakes.”
The court’s decision to uphold his sentence was denounced by the rights group Reporters Without Borders (RSF), as well as the French government.
Gleizes’s jailing comes at a time of diplomatic friction between Paris and Algiers that began last year when France officially backed Moroccan sovereignty over the disputed Western Sahara region, where Algeria backs the pro-independence Polisario Front.
He is currently France’s only journalist imprisoned abroad, according to RSF, and French President Emmanuel Macron has vowed to work toward his release.
Mother makes plea
The mother of the jailed 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, which was dated December 10 and seen by AFP on Monday.
“Nowhere in any of his writings will you find any trace of statements hostile to Algeria and its people,” she wrote in her letter to President Abdelmadjid Tebboune.
