The Paris administrative court on Friday, October 20, suspended the expulsion order targeting Mariam Abou Daqqa, activist of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), who arrived legally in France at the end of September to hold conferences. “The Minister of the Interior has committed a serious and manifestly illegal attack on the freedom of expression and the freedom to come and go” of Ms. Abou Daqqa, considers the judge in his order, including Agence France -Press has been informed.
The Ministry of the Interior immediately announced that it would appeal this decision. The PFLP is an organization classified as terrorist by the European Union.
Last Monday, Ms. Abou Daqqa was placed under house arrest in Bouches-du-Rhône for 45 days, until the end of November, with the obligation to report every day at 12:30 p.m. to the police station, while awaiting his expulsion.
“I don’t understand what’s happening to me: I have a valid visa. I am not a terrorist but a left-wing activist who only comes [to France] to talk about the rights of women and Palestinians. I thought we were in a democracy here,” the activist declared on Monday as she left a police station in the center of Marseille.
The Ministry of the Interior considers that the activist is “a member of the political bureau of the PFLP in Gaza” and that in “the current context, [the program of 15 conferences in France] is likely to constitute a disturbance of public order that it’s about prevention.”
Several conferences, at which Mariam Abou Daqqa was to speak, have been banned in recent days by the French authorities, notably in Lyon and Martigues (Bouches-du-Rhône). The President of the National Assembly, Yaël Braun-Pivet, decided to ban the activist from coming to the Chamber on November 9.
