This Politician Posted a Quote About Palestinian Resistance. Now France Is Dragging Her Through the Courts

Por Soraya Kishtwari — Novara Media

For the last three years, Rima Hassan has watched in horror as thousands of people have been killed in her family’s homeland. The French jurist and La France Insoumise (LFI) MEP, who was born stateless in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria, is one of France’s most outspoken critics of both Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the complicity of Europe’s governments.

Now, she could be sent to prison over a post on social media.

In March, Hassan posted a quotation on X/Twitter attributed to Kōzō Okamoto, a member of the Japanese Red Army who took part in a 1972 attack on an Israeli airport in which 26 people were killed.

“I gave my youth to the Palestinian cause,” Okamoto’s quotation read. “As long as there is oppression, resistance will not only be a right, but a duty.”

Far-right National Rally politician Matthias Renault , interior minister Laurent Nuñez and two French pro-Israel lobby groups reported Hassan to prosecutors for apologie du terrorisme (the glorification of terrorism) – a criminal offence. Hassan denied the charges and said her main goal had been to share a quotation about the “philosophy of resistance”, and that she couldn’t be accused of glorifying terrorism for doing so.

Hassan’s trial began on 19 October. If found guilty, she could be sentenced to up to seven years in prison and fined €100,000 under French law. Her situation, she said, is the latest in a series of legal and political battles in France over solidarity with Palestine .

“ People who stand in solidarity with Palestine are labelled as terrorists because it [this label] is the only instrument that allows them to silence concrete opposition and activism,” Hassan told Novara Media ahead of her trial.

This isn’t the first time the French state has brought the full force of its institutional machinery against Hassan. 22 legal proceedings have been initiated against her in the last two years in connection with her political views (six have been closed by prosecutors without questioning, 13 after questioning and three remain open). In September, a separate trial in relation to two social media posts from 2025 was adjourned.

Prior to the opening of the investigation into the post in March, police had reportedly already been surveilling Hassan , tracking her movements and monitoring her phone activity. In April, she was taken into custody for questioning in what she describes as a “deliberate attempt” to circumvent her parliamentary immunity. Details of her arrest, including the claim she was carrying drugs, were then leaked to the press (the drug probe was subsequently dropped).

Hassan’s lawyer, Vincent Brengarth, has long maintained his client’s innocence , alleging the prosecutions are part of a “campaign of judicial harassment aimed at silencing her”. Five UN special rapporteurs have raised similar concerns , warning the French government that Hassan appeared to be facing “political and judicial harassment”.

Hassan told Novara Media she believed that the accusations against her were a “misuse of anti-terrorism laws”.

“The shift is very interesting,” she said, noting how she believes that we’re moving towards a situation in which the accusation of terrorism is directed at “all political opposition”.

Hassan’s case is perhaps the most high-profile of hundreds of cases of alleged apologie du terrorisme offences in France. In October 2023, police arrested trade union leader Jean-Paul Delescaut over a leaflet published following the 7 October attacks (Delescaut was convicted and sentenced, before being acquitted on appeal ). In another case, the suspended sentence of a former deputy mayor, Mohamed Makni, for sharing a quotation which described the attacks as “resistance” was upheld by France’s highest court (Makni is now challenging the ruling at the European Court of Human Rights). B etween October 2023 and October 2025, more than 350 people were convicted of the offence in total. While it’s unclear how many were in relation to Palestine, rulings surged after 7 October.

None of this may surprise anyone living in the UK. Since it was banned as a terrorist group in July 2025, those in the UK expressing support for Palestine Action, an organisation which targeted companies involved in supplying military equipment to Israel, risk up to 14 years in prison. What’s followed, due to huge public opposition to the ban, has been a 1,553% uptick in terrorism arrests – 94% of them in the year ending June 2026 linked to the proscription.

Dr Eliza Bechtold, a trained lawyer and a researcher at the University of Oxford, studies how modern anti-terror frameworks use over-expansive definitions of “terrorist-related speech” to criminalise political dissent.

“The more we look at it, the more we see how it’s being used by states as sort of a cudgel to silence disfavoured political viewpoints,” Bechtold told Novara Media. “That has profound impacts on public discourse, freedom of association, all of these really fundamental rights that underpin democracies.

“Academics, human rights lawyers, legal advocates have been sounding the alarm for quite some time on these types of offences that punish purely speech, absent the attendant act, and are becoming increasingly attenuated from traditional criminal notions of incitement.”

Bechtold also noted in a recent paper that “no contemporary example better supports just how concerning this is than the global policing of speech surrounding the war in Gaza” – an analysis shared by the UN special rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression. She told Novara Media that while the wider “chilling effect” of prosecutions is hard to measure, their impact certainly extends well beyond those prosecuted .

Palestine is expected to be a key campaigning issue for Hassan’s party, LFI, in the run up to France’s presidential election in April next year.

For those caught between their conscience and the law, Hassan is unequivocal: “Today, for me, they [advocates for the Palestinian cause] are… the heroes of our time: those who make sure that our countries are not complicit, and who target the material and logistical support provided to Israel.”

Hassan’s trial – “the trial of the century for freedom of expression”, Brengarth said – continues at Paris criminal court.

Fonte: Novara Media