French-Algerian author Bounal Sansal has been pardoned and released from prison, the ALGERIAN Presidential Office said in a statement on Wednesday.
The move, which means Sansal can be transferred to Germany for medical treatment, comes after the German president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, urged Algeria to Free Sansal.
“The President of the Republic decided to respond positively to the request of the president of the friendly Federal Republic of Germany, which was issued on Wednesday.
The Algerian president, Abdelmadjid Tebboune, previously rejected French requests for Sansal to be pardoned due to his old age and health condition. Sansal, 81, suffered from prostate cancer.
A vocal critic of the Algerian regime, Sansal was arrested at Airgiers Airport in November last year and sentenced to five years on the march in March, on charges of abandoning national unity. His arrest came shortly after commenting in an interview that France had unfairly ceded Moroccan territory to Algeria during the colonial period.
Relations between Paris and Algiers have worsened since Macron backed Moroccan Sovereignty in Western Shaahara in 2024, and there are proposals made by the author because of the two countries.
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, said that Algeria is the “disgrace” itself in jailing the author.
By releasing Sansal in Germany, the Algerian government found a way out of the diplomatic standoff with the former colonizer without losing political face. Tebboune himself was treated in a hospital in Germany after contracting covid-19 in 2020.
On Monday, Steinmeier said that the pardon of Sansal would be “an expression of the vision of the humanitarian and political personal relations of President Tebboune and the good relations between our countries”.
During the last few months many international authors, including Salman Rushdie, Annie Ernaux and Weele Soyinka, have released the author’s release in Algeria.