In Algeria, the courts have decided to keep journalist Rabah Karèche in pre-trial detention. This correspondent for a daily in the south of the country is being prosecuted within the framework of the law which punishes “hate speech”. Lawyers accuse President Tebboune of having guided justice by qualifying the journalist as an “arsonist”.
Tuesday, June 29, the indictment chamber of the court of Tamanrasset, 1,900 kilometers south of Algiers, decided to prolong the ordeal of journalist Rabah Karèche and his family.
Placed in pre-trial detention on April 19, he will remain in prison following an appeal procedure introduced by the public prosecutor of this city. The representative of the prosecution opposed the scheduling of his trial following a request for an extension of the investigation phase. Rabah Karèche is being prosecuted for “attacking the integrity of the national territory”, “voluntary publication of false information liable to endanger public order” and “voluntary dissemination of false information liable to undermine public order and use various means to undermine national security and unity ”. Prosecutions initiated on the basis of provisions of the penal code and the law relating to preventing and combating discrimination and hate speech.
Police harassment
Correspondent for the newspaper Liberté, Rabah Karèche was responsible for covering the news in a territory as large as two and a half times the size of France. Rabah Karèche is interested in social-economic problems in the regions of the great south of Algeria, in particular cases related to gold trafficking and smuggling. Within the corporation, the journalist enjoys a very good reputation. In 2020, he was summoned by the police to explain himself on a series of articles devoted to common law cases involving members of the police.
But the article in question relates to a completely different matter. On Saturday, April 17, 2021, Rabah Karèche covered a gathering of citizens from the Tamanrasset region who came to denounce the route of the new administrative division. Published the next day, the article entitled “The Ahaggar, the battle of the territories” angered central and local authorities. The journalist was summoned by the police on the spot and then placed in preventive detention the next day.
Curiously, the journalist is not prosecuted for the content of his writing but for having disseminated this article on social networks. A desire to circumvent the press offense, by making it coincide with the scope of application of the law relating to the prevention and the fight against discrimination and hate speech, accuse lawyers and journalists gathered on Monday, June 28 in Algiers at a press conference.
For Saïd Zahi, one of the lawyers appointed for his defense, the journalist has “at no time undermined national unity, where there is hate speech and discrimination. No provision of this law applies to the case of this journalist ”.
“In his article, Rabah Karèche only covered a demonstration by residents of the Tamanrasset region who denounced the new administrative division. A territorial division that the authorities hastily implemented without taking the time to study its consequences on the local populations. Rabah Karèche deserves to be congratulated for having publicized a problematic situation, but instead, he finds himself in prison, ”insisted the lawyer, speaking at this press conference.
The weight of Tebboune
For Me Zoubida Assoul, the Karèche affair constitutes a violation of article 50 of the Algerian Constitution which states that “press offenses cannot be punished by a custodial sentence”. She also recalled the exceptional nature of the use of pre-trial detention in Algerian law.
“There is a desire to postpone the holding of the journalist’s public hearing before the Tamanrasset court. The authorities fear the arrival of a group of lawyers who will demonstrate, as in the case of Khaled Drareni, that this case was fabricated from scratch and that he did not commit any crime ”, underlined Me Assoul during this meeting in Algiers.
The two lawyers wished to denounce the interference of the Algerian President in this affair. Indeed, in an interview with the French magazine Le Point, he was questioned about the case of Rabah Karèche. Response from Abdelmadjid Tebboune: “He wrongly played arsonist on a very sensitive subject. Very serious”.
For Me Assoul and Me Zahi, this declaration is a “violation of the secrecy of the investigation and the presumption of innocence”. According to them, the Head of State influenced the course of this case, hence the decision of the public prosecutor to require the postponement of the hearing and to request the continuation of the investigation phase.
President Tebboune had already acted in this way by commenting on the case of another journalist, Khaled Drareni, when the latter was imprisoned. He then described him as “khabardji” (scales, spy) during a meeting with the press in May 2020. A few months later, Drareni was sentenced as a last resort to two years in prison for “inciting a gathering not armed “and” attack on national unity “, before being released in February 2021 following a presidential pardon.
“The President’s statement influenced justice in the case of Khaled Drareni when his file is totally empty. In a hyper presidential system like that of Algeria, the head of state has the status of God. When he qualifies Drareni as “khabardji”, it is obvious that no magistrate will dare to contradict him”, regretted Me Saïd Zahi.
For lawyers, and this observation is shared by a large part of Algerian civil society, the succession of lawsuits that have targeted journalists in recent months in Algeria (such as Khaled Drareni but also journalist Mustapha Bendjama, editor-in-chief of a newspaper regional) prove that there is a clear degradation of press freedom in Algeria. Unperturbed, the Algerian authorities, for their part, believe that freedom of the press is now established as an “immutable constitutional principle”, and that these various cases only concern common offenses.
