France arrests journalist for reporting on French military cooperation with multiple countries, including Egypt

Due to reporting that revealed confidential information about French military cooperation with several governments, including Egypt’s, French journalist Ariane Lavrilleux has been detained since Tuesday morning by French authorities after she was arrested and her house was searched.

Lavrilleux had co-authored reports published by the French investigative website Disclose that relied on confidential French military documents to look into the French military providing arms and intelligence to Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Russia. Now, Lavrilleux is being held by France’s General Directorate for Internal Security (DGSI), the intelligence service affiliated with the country’s interior ministry, in an attempt to pressure her to reveal the source of these documents, according to Disclose.

On Tuesday morning, DGSI police officers, accompanied by an examining magistrate, raided Lavrilleux's home and searched it before arresting her and detaining her at the Marseille police headquarters, where she was accompanied by a lawyer, Disclose announced yesterday.

According to the Tuesday statement, Lavrilleux’s arrest came as part of an investigation launched in July 2022 into “the compromise of national defense secrets and revealing of information that could lead to the identification of a protected agent,” which Disclose considered to be the “latest episode of unacceptable intimidation of the outlet’s journalists to identify our sources who helped reveal the Sirli military operation in Egypt.”

In recent years, Disclose published a series of investigations into French military relations with a number of countries and arms sales to them. The investigations were based on hundreds of documents from the services of the presidential office, the French Armed Forces Ministry, and the French military intelligence services that the website obtained from a source whose name it did not reveal.

In November 2021, the investigations included a series of reports related to military cooperation with the Egyptian government, dubbed “the Egypt Papers.” One report dealt with Operation Sirli, a joint military operation in which France reportedly provided intelligence about possible militant threats to Egypt’s western borders, but, the publication stated, it later became clear that the Egyptian side used this information to conduct airstrikes against civilians suspected of being smugglers between 2016 and 2018.

One other report in the Egyptian file dealt with a shift in the French government's diplomatic relations since 2013 that has seen France focus increasingly on arms sales while ignoring the political situation in Egypt. A third report said that Paris had approved three French companies to transfer spyware technology to the Egyptian government and oversee the installation and operation of a surveillance system for the collection of information en masse from the telecommunications network in Egypt.

In statements today, Disclose said it learned that the DGSI is accusing the journalist of publishing five reports since 2019 that dealt with French arms sales, including reports on Operation Sirli and the sale of Rafale fighters to Egypt, as well as reports on the delivery of weapons to Russia until 2020, the sale of ammunition to the UAE and Saudi Arabia, and the transfer of illicit arms from the UAE to Libya.

Disclose stressed that such confidential information is important for the public debate about France’s relations with what they described as “dictatorships,” and sheds light on the use of French weapons against civilian populations.

“Why does it matter if these revelations on the sale of arms from France are embarrassing for the French state?” the website said, calling for Lavrilleux’s immediate release after more than a day in custody.

For his part, the head of the European Union and Balkans office of Reporters Sans Frontières, Pavol Szalai, condemned the arrest of Lavrilleux and the search of her home and seizure of electronic devices. “We fear that the actions of the DGSI undermine the secrecy of sources,” Szalai told Mada Masr.

Szalai pointed out that France has witnessed several incidents in the past in which the government attempted to pressure journalists to reveal their sources, which is permitted by French law, but it usually takes the form of summoning journalists for an investigation in which they can reserve their right not to reveal sources.

Resorting to arrests and searches are rarely used tools in these cases and represent an escalation against journalists in France, he added, pointing to a similar case that took place last year, when the DGSI arrested a journalist for publishing a book about the intelligence body.

In December, the DGSI summoned Disclose co-founder and editor-in-chief Geoffrey Livolsi, along with two other French journalists, for publishing an investigation in 2018 about favoritism in French Armed Forces contracts.

Before that, in 2019, the same three journalists were summoned by the DGSI for questioning at the request of the French Armed Forces Ministry in relation to what they published about France’s involvement in the war in Yemen through arms sales to the Saudis and Emiratis.