Hanna Gharib on the French National Day: Liberate Georges Abdallah

The French National Day is celebrated on the 14th of July to remind the world with the historical significance of the triumph of the popular democratic revolution that lead to the victory of the republic over monarchy and feudalism on 1789, and whose principles were formulated in the “Declaration of the rights of man and of the citizen” released few days after storming the notorious Bastille prison which witnessed long episodes of oppression, intimidation and executions.
Today, the French republic remembers and celebrates this memory to reaffirm the triumph of the revolutionary principles - freedom, equality and brotherhood - in the French cities and in its embassies around the world; but the French government forgets to apply the principles of this revolution on the town of Lannemezan where Georges Ibrahim Abdallah spends his thirty second year of detention despite the fact that he satisfied the release conditions seventeen years ago. He remains in detention in spite of the decision of the court of the “Pau” province to release him before the appeal of its decision thirteen years ago, and despite the fact that the judgment and the appeal reached the decision of release and deportation to Lebanon three years ago. Yet, the intervention of the ministries of justice and interior through the political decision not to deport him in contrary to all jurisdictional orders, French laws and the principles of the 14th of July revolution that preached with justice and freedom, brought the case back to the starting point.
The seventh article of the “Declaration of the rights of man and of the citizen” proclaimed by the revolution that you are celebrating has stated that: “No man can be accused, arrested nor detained but in the cases determined by the law, and according to the forms which it has prescribed. Those who solicit, dispatch, carry out or cause to be carried out arbitrary orders, must be punished...”
The case of George Ibrahim Abdallah has become a case of arbitrary detention of a man who has spent all what the law required and has applied all the jurisdictional decisions while the people in power decided to detain his freedom and sentenced him to stay indefinitely behind the bars without legal justification, and this practically means a decision of slow execution until the termination of his life. The detention of George Ibrahim Abdallah has become a very clear case of arbitrary detention and of grave injustice that the French government stands accountable for.

Today we demand the French government to commit to its own laws, declarations and revolution principles and to stop the arbitrary oppression against George Abdallah who already is sixty five years old without any perspectives or ways to achieve freedom after spending all terms. The French authorities have sooted the image of the revolution which became dull and full of hatred, revenge and oppression. The values and principles won’t materialize without freedom and moral compensation for George for all the years he has lost due to the abstention of the French administration from applying the law.

Our Lebanese government which adopted this cause under the pressure of protests and formed a ministerial committee for follow-up in 2013 upon the proposal of the minister of interior has completely abandoned it since then and its committee did not initiate any action. Despite the promises of the prime minister in 2012 to raise the issue with the French presidency, all his promises went in vain. After the minister of foreign affairs congratulated the Lebanese people for the liberation of George Abdallah following the judicial ruling in 2013, he halted any serious pursuit after the refusal of the French ministry of interior to apply the demand of deportation.
Today we tell the prime minister and the ministers of foreign and interior affairs and all the other ministers that this cause is a national cause and they urgently have to pursue the previous decisions and commitments as they should do concerning all other kidnapped Lebanese, and we remind them that the United Nations committee concerned with arbitrary detention issues supervised by the UN general secretary’s assistant has officially documented the case of George Abdallah with the administrative and arbitrary detainees.

The preservation of the principles of the French democratic revolution that you celebrate today does not actualize through regression against of US and Israeli pressures and it stands above political or electoral interests, and this is where the French leadership has shown total failure and impaled the essence of those principles as it practices against Georges Abdallah what the tyrants of the Bastille had practiced against the French people.

Let the French National Day be an occasion of freedom, justice and equality; an occasion for the immediate release of Georges Ibrahim Abdallah without any delays.

Beirut, Lebanon
July 14, 2016