The Doualemn affair once again illustrates the instrumentalisation of the immigration issue in public debate by a right wing that is increasingly resembling the extreme right. Responding to this as a legal professional is not without its difficulties.
An influencer with 168,000 subscribers on TikTok, Doualemn was arrested on 5 January 2025 in Montpellier and held in detention. In a video on TikTok, he had made comments about an opponent of the Algerian regime, which had been the subject of fluctuating translations, initially presented by the French authorities as a call to murder.
Doulemn was deported to Algeria on 7 January 2025 by decision of the Minister, without being able to be heard by the courts. The Algerian authorities refused him access to French territory and immediately sent him back to France. The French courts subsequently suspended the expulsion, ruling that the procedure was irregular. This case is part of a tense diplomatic climate between France and Algeria.
Following the suspension of the minister’s expulsion order by the Administrative tribunal of Paris and the subsequent annulment of two expulsion orders issued by the Prefect of Hérault by the Administrative tribunal of Melun, the Minister of the Interior, Bruno Retailleau of the Republican Party, took the opportunity to renew his criticism of the judicial system.
In an interview with Le Journal du Dimanche on 8 February 2025, the minister, who had already questioned the intangible and sacred nature of the rule of law in October 2024, said:
“This is an individual who has twice tried to enter France illegally, breaking our laws and our borders. He is a repeat offender with six convictions, including two for drug trafficking, and a total of eleven years and eleven months in prison. (…) But that’s not all: he has also made explicit threats on the Internet, calling for people to ‘kill’ and ’cause pain’. (…) This case highlights an essential point: the law as it is applied today undermines the state’s determination to protect French citizens and ensure respect for the republican order. It illustrates perfectly what I have been saying for a long time: the rule of law has gone astray to the point where it no longer protects French society but disarms the state. When a rule no longer protects the French, it must be changed”
Aware of the difficulty of the task of writing court judgments, and anxious to present the legal reasoning and the difficulty of judging concrete cases, I take advantage of the privileged access to court judgments. I was thus able to trace Mr N.’s career, which explains why he is still in France, despite his illegal arrival several years ago. It should be noted that since the opening up of judicial data on open-data.justiceadministrative.fr, administrative court decisions are now freely accessible.
But these decisions are anonymous. So, in the middle of my exegesis, I realised that if I were to comment on these decisions by linking them to their sources, I would be committing a serious breach of the duty of discretion and respect for the private life of this person. Moreover, this is an old decision from 2008-2009 which, incidentally, allowed the prefect to dismiss Mr N., but which was not followed up administratively.
I cannot, therefore, try to mitigate the statements of the Minister, a high representative of the State, who openly violates the constitutional principles of the right to privacy, while at the same time invoking unspecified offences that are time-barred.
I can, however, rely on recent rulings published on the home pages of court websites.
In concluding that the withdrawal of Mr N’s residence permit was unlawful, the Paris Administrative Court noted in particular that the applicant’s last criminal conviction had been 23 years ago. As regards the comments on Tiktok, the media debate raised doubts as to whether they could be classified as incitement to “catch” a man and give him a “severe beating”. The judges in Paris found that the comments constituted incitement to deliberate violence on Algerian territory against a political opponent living in Algeria, which could justify a decision to expel him, but did not constitute an immediate threat to public order in France such as to justify his expulsion as a matter of urgency. The Melun judges agreed with the Paris judges.
We’ll come back to this later, because apparently some people just don’t get it any more. But that’s not the main subject of this post.
To be continued…
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