Rima Hassan's Custody : Texbook Weaponization of The Judiciary

Petty, very petty politics.

We will not linger on the mechanics of Rima Hassan’s police custody on charges of terrorism glorification — that analysis is better left to legal experts. What deserves scrutiny is the timing, the context, and the brazen double standard at work.

Rima Hassan is a Member of the European Parliament. That status comes with parliamentary immunity — a protection designed not as a personal privilege but as a consititutional guarantee that elected officials can exercise their mandate free from harassment of the two other branch of government, the executive and the judiciary. She can only be detained in flagrante delicto for acts entirely disconnected from her mandate.

And yet, a prosecutor compliant enough to ignore that constitutional principle ordered the summons. Police officers obedient enougde delivered it. Hassan, for her part, was unwise enough to comply without invoking her immunity. And La France Insoumise (Ms. Hassan party, left-wing) MPs were spineless enough not to march immediately to where she was detained and demand her release — a right French parliamentarians unambiguously possess.

Everyone failed. But none of that is the real story.

The real story is the timing.

Hassan’s detention and its carefully orchestrated media rollout came immediately after a crushing municipal election defeat for the centrist bloc, while the deeply contested Yadan law is being debated in the Senate — a bill that seeks to criminalize criticism of Israel and Zionism by rebranding it as antisemitism — and as Israel is defeated in its illegal war of aggression against Iran.

The political calculation is clumsy enough to be insulting. The demonization playbook being deployed against the radical left today is identical to the one used against the National Front for four decades — and with a 2027 presidential election on the horizon, both ends of the political spectrum are giving the establishment cold sweats.

The double standard is staggering.

Since October 7, 2023, hundreds of terrorism glorification criminal cases have been opened. Justice Ministry data shows between 167 and 315 individuals prosecuted per quarter for glorifying or inciting terrorism. By contrast, prosecution of war crime glorification — a legally distinct but morally equivalent category — runs at a fraction of that rate: 37 to 56 cases per quarter.

The divergence in application is not subtle. Meyer Habib, the Franco-Israeli then a right-wing MP, declared from the floor of the National Assembly in December 2023 — in response to the death of a French foreign ministry official in Gaza bombardments — “and it’s not over.” His parliamentary immunity was shielded by Assembly Speaker Yaël Braun-Pivet. In October 2023, he had calmly described Gaza’s civilian population as a “cancer” on video. No criminal prosecution for war crime glorification followed.

Television commentator Barbara Lefebvre went further, calling on air for Gaza to become a “blank zone” and for “those people” to be resettled elsewhere — a statement that, under any consistent reading of the law, constitutes glorification of crimes against humanity. She was questioned. No indictment, no court date, no consequence.

The legal architecture enabling all of this was built in 2014.

The Cazeneuve counterterrorism law — pushed through by then-Prime Minister Manuel Valls — extracted terrorism glorification from the 1881 Press Freedom Act and embedded it in the general penal code. The practical consequences are significant: immediate police custody became possible, search warrants easier to execute, statute of limitation far longer.

In 2023, the Dupond-Moretti instruction went further still, classifying the word “resistance” itself as potential terrorism glorification — a move that former anti-terrorism judge and High Criminal Court Justice Marc Trévidic publicly condemned in October 2024 as a total perversion of the law. “Every court is now competent,” he warned, “every judge can decide whether a word, a text, a placard constitutes a terrorist act.”

That is not rule of law. That is rule by law — selectively applied, politically calibrated, and constitutionally corrosive.

Thirteen previous complaints filed against Ms. Hassan by the National Online Hate Prosecutor’s Office were dropped after prosecutors examined the context of her statements, heard her out, and found no case to answer. The fourteenth, apparently, was worth a media splash.

Draw your own conclusions about who gave the order — and why.