Today, Monday (10/11/2025), German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier requested the release of the French-Algerian writer Boualem Sansal and offered to host him in the Central European country, a year after his imprisonment and eight months after he was sentenced in Algeria to five years in prison on charges of attacking national unity and the economy, possessing videos and publications of a subversive nature, and insulting the constituent bodies.
A statement said that Steinmeier asked his Algerian counterpart Abdelmadjid Tebboune for a “humanitarian gesture” towards the writer. “In view of Sansal’s advanced age and fragile state of health, the Federal President has offered Sansal to leave for Germany and for subsequent medical treatment in our country,” the presidential memorandum issued today said.
For his part, Steinmeier said that he asked Tebboune for forgiveness in light of the long personal relationship between the two and the good relations between their countries. The Federal President added that pardoning Sansal would be a demonstration of the humanitarian spirit and political vision. Paris also asked Algeria to show leniency towards Sansal, whose conviction further strained already difficult Franco-Algerian relations.
Controversial statements
Sansal, who will become a naturalized French citizen in 2024, received the German Booksellers’ Peace Prize in 2011, and the German branch of the International PEN Club recently called for his release. The author of the book “The Oath of the Barbarians” (1999) was arrested at Algiers airport in November 2024, after statements he made to right-wing extremist French media, borderQuestioning the borders between Algeria and Morocco.
In it, Sansal pointed out that France unfairly transferred Moroccan lands to Algeria during the colonial period, between 1830 and 1962, a claim that Algeria considers a challenge to its sovereignty and coincides with ancient Moroccan territorial claims.
In July, an Algerian appeals court upheld a five-year prison sentence for Sansal, 80, who suffers from prostate cancer. Sansal, known in France for his anti-Islamist and anti-Algerian authorities views, received the Grand Prize for Fiction from the French Academy and won the Prix du Premier Roman and the Prix Tropiques for his first novel.
DZC (EFE, AFP)
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