He is a French citizen who was arbitrarily arrested and detained in Qatar in early 2020. He is a French citizen who was placed in solitary confinement and subjected to acts of torture. He is a French citizen who never benefited from the assistance of the Quai d’Orsay, even though, upon his request, the UN special rapporteurs documented, recorded and noted the arbitrary nature of both his arrest and his detention. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has never demanded what it has the right and duty to demand: consular protection defined and guaranteed by the 1963 Vienna Convention.
At the end of 2020, at the cost of a memorandum of understanding with the Qatari authorities extracted under duress, Mr. Tayeb Benabderrahmane was expelled. Three years later, in 2023, a court in Qatar sentenced him to death in absentia. French officials nevertheless remain silent, probably considering that this conviction is exclusively virtual and has no direct threatening effect on their national. However, at the beginning of 2026, while traveling in Malaysia, he was arrested, following a report from the authorities in Doha, and held for several hours at Kuala Lumpur airport. The incident in itself refutes French relativism and highlights the risks to which Mr. Benabderrahmane is exposed when he has to travel, particularly outside the European Union.
No investment, no economic agreement should make us forget our principles
While the UN has recognized and objectified the arbitrary nature, negation of the rights of defense and attack on the human person, of the detention of Mr. Benabderrahmane, France locks itself in a strange silence, orthogonal to the values that it intends to defend. On the occasion, this October 9, of the world day dedicated to the fight against the death penalty, the United Nations, through in particular two of its bodies, the working group on arbitrary detentions and the working group on kidnappings and forced disappearances, call on States, in a joint document, to protect their nationals when they are confronted with foreign jurisdictions that do not guarantee their fundamental rights as litigants. Among the 16 death row prisoners named in the UN declaration is, in full, the name of Mr. Benabderrahmane.
Significant financial interests
His affair is symptomatic of a form of mixture where excessive caution, complacency and denial interact in the gray areas of economic interests and political intertwining. Thus, when in Paris many voices continue to denounce the multiple interferences, Russian and others, targeting France, the activism exercised in France by Doha gives rise to few questions. Qatari “soft power”, of which football constitutes one of the most visible and efficient tools in terms of influence, has operated widely and for many years. It hypnotizes as much as it anesthetizes. It is diplomatic, media, economic, but, under the cover of the modernity which it boasts, it carries within itself a latent agenda whose links with Brotherhood are proven historically and financially.
The report “Muslim Brothers and political Islamism in France”, commissioned by the Ministry of the Interior, has clearly established this almost assumed porosity. This reality is nevertheless euphemized, as if Qatar’s financial strength and its investments of around 30 billion euros in numerous sectors paralyzed and annihilated criticism of a regime which is also the subject, internationally, of numerous reservations regarding its practices in matters of public freedoms and human rights. The Benabderrahmane file is thus hostage to a form of reason of state marked by collusion against a backdrop of investments and lobbying, with France ranking as the first European recipient of Qatari capital. This file is above all both a revealer and a summary of an unhealthy and asymmetrical relationship.
During the 9th World Congress for the Universal Abolition of the Death Penalty, which was held in Paris last June, the President of the Republic denounced and deplored its application in numerous countries, citing Zimbabwe, Malaysia and Zambia. About Qatar, which sentenced one of our fellow citizens to death, Emmanuel Macron will not have said a word. On the occasion of the pantheonization of Robert Badinter in 2025, the Head of State nevertheless had this formula: “The dead listen to us”. The living too… Mr. Benabderrahmane is alive, French and sentenced to capital punishment. He listens to us and he expects support from France. No investment, no economic agreement should make us forget our principles.
* Arnaud Benedetti is associate professor at Paris-Sorbonne University, essayist and founder of La Nouvelle Revue politique.
