The Lebanese Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, imprisoned in France for almost 38 years, remains in prison. Administrative justice refused, Thursday, February 10, to order the expulsion of one of the oldest detainees in France, sentenced to life imprisonment for complicity in the assassination of American and Israeli diplomats in 1987. This order of expulsion from France was, according to his defense, a necessary step towards a possible release, while Georges Ibrahim Abdallah saw his nine requests for parole rejected.
“No legislative or regulatory provision, nor any general principle, requires the Minister of the Interior to take an expulsion measure against a foreign national who, still in detention, does not constitute a threat to the ‘public order”the court said in its decision.
Georges Ibrahim Abdallah has been releasable since 1999. Justice responded favorably to his request for release in 2013, provided that he is subject to an expulsion order from the French Ministry of the Interior. So place Beauvau, Manuel Valls never took it. In 2020, Georges Ibrahim Abdallah tried his luck again with Gérald Darmanin. His letters remained unanswered, he then seized the administrative court.
“Not surprised“by the court’s decision, his lawyer, Jean-Louis Chalanset, regretted that the“we turn arround” : “As long as there is no guarantee of expulsion, we cannot file a new request for release”. “Once again, the political and executive power prevents the conditional release of Georges Ibrahim Abdallah”he launched.
At the hearing at the end of January, the public rapporteur had recommended the rejection of her request, on the basis of the argument taken up by the court in its decision. “Such a solution is hardly satisfactory, but no other seems to us to be possible within the legal framework”, she commented. “It is quite obvious that the continued detention” of Georges Abdallah “obeys considerations of an extra-legal nature and which escapes you”, she had concluded, hoping that her situation “may evolve by other means”.