ON APRIL 2, French-Palestinian MEP Rima Hassan was arrested and held in custody in Paris for a social media post after police launched an investigation into her statements for alleged “terrorism apologia.”

For a post made on X posted a few days before on March 26, she faced a charge which French law normally reserves for those caught in the act of committing a crime, known as a “flagrant délit.”

Hassan and her lawyers have claimed it is the first time this charge was used against a sitting member of parliament for a statement they made online.

In most cases, elected officials in France are given parliamentary immunity, which protects them from being held in custody — but “flagrant délit” is one of the few exceptions to this immunity.

“It’s the first time police sought this type of charge for a Tweet,” Ms Hassan told the Morning Star. “There was a desire from the court to overlook my parliamentary immunity and to obtain my arrest.

“The last time an MEP was hit with [this type of charge] was during the Qatargate scandal, when elected officials were caught with suitcases full of cash given to them by Qatar.”

The police probe into Hassan’s post on X had been opened a few days prior to her arrest last month.

It followed complaints concerning a quote Hassan shared from Kozo Okamoto, a member of the Japanese Red Army who took part in terrorist attacks on the Tel Aviv airport which killed 26 people.

An investigation by Mediapart later revealed that prior to her arrest, prosecutors tracked the MEP’s phone, looking at records dating back three months.

The Paris district court also went as far as to request Hassan’s travel records from the French national rail SNCF and Air France, as well as request help from Europol to further track her.

“It seems extreme that I would face the same type of charge for a Tweet,” she said.

But this latest campaign of what she calls “political-judicial harassment” is not the first time Hassan has faced legal issues. She has been the subject of 16 police complaints over the span of two years — about one every month and a half.

The majority of which came from groups or politicians “who are not neutral on the Israel-Palestine issue and who are supported by those in power,” she explained.

Hassan, a jurist and lawyer, has maintained these complaints only concern statements which were not illegal, such as defending Palestinians’ right of return or when saying that colonised people have a “right to armed struggle” in international law.

One claim, she said, was made after she quoted the Palestinian poet and writer Mahmoud Darwish.

“And those are just the ones prosecutors have decided to examine. There are others which were dismissed immediately.”

Since elected to the European Parliament in 2024, Hassan has become a leading voice on the issue of Palestine in France and Europe at large.

She was one of the core participants in the successful campaign against the Yadan law — which campaigners said would have effectively banned criticism of Israel in France.

Hassan also launched the European Citizen’s Initiative (ECI) to suspend the EU-Israel free trade agreement, which broke records when it received over a million signatures in three months.

But her activism goes beyond her role as an elected official. Hassan has twice joined the Freedom Flotilla Coalition in their mission to bring life-saving medical supplies and food to Gaza, an action for which she was detained by Israel alongside activist Greta Thunberg.

Her arrest by French authorities last month, she argues, fits within a larger context of repression of Palestinian and pro-Palestine voices in the West.

On top of her legal troubles, Hassan’s activism for Palestine and her prominent position in France’s largest left-wing populist party, La France Insoumise (LFI), Hassan has attracted the ire of France’s establishment.

When Hassan was arrested last month, the main story which ran on CNews, a 24-hour news channel owned by conservative billionaire Vincent Bolloré, was that she supposedly had illegal drugs on her — a fact leaked to the press while she was still in custody and was later reiterated by prosecutors.

Several days later they cleared her of all drug charges, following a series of tests..

A formal complaint has since been lodged with France’s broadcast regulator, detailing several direct accusations against the MEP after the Paris prosecutor’s office has said they identified a substance “resembling” a synthetic drug called 3-MMC.

“It’s a war in the media as well: ‘Rima was arrested’ — that is an image that allows people to believe I have done a very bad thing,” she said.

Her status as the favorite pariah of establishment figures was perhaps best exemplified when last year, the former interior minister Bruno Retailleau called for Hassan, a Palestinian who was born in a refugee camp in Syria and came to France at the age of nine, to have her citizenship revoked.

But why has Hassan, and by extension her LFI party, become the target of such intense attacks?

“It has nothing to do with the fact that we want retirement to be at age 60. What LFI has not been forgiven for is its line on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

“Broadly speaking, the traditional left in France is in part still a zionist left, let’s be honest. You have many voices in the Socialist Party who are openly zionist, many of whom show unconditional support of Israel.

But Hassan told the Star attacks on her would not deter her activism: “I’m an activist with a cause to carry. I’m not here to smooth things over. That’s not my role.

“I’ve helped blow open these four main taboos: on zionism, on the right of return of refugees, on alternatives to two states, and on the question of armed struggle of the Palestinian people.

She added: “And as long as leaders do not ultimately hear [the voices of Palestinians], they will always fall short of any solutions.

“I myself am living proof. I haven’t gone through what Gazans have. I have the privilege of a second exile, a Western passport.

“But there is not a single day in my life when I don’t think of myself as a Palestinian refugee, coming from a history of dispossession, whose family is buried in a refugee camp, who lived through that humiliation across multiple generations, who knew the loss of a homeland, who knew displacement.

“I’ve said it since the beginning of my entry into politics.The Palestinian question is a test for Western democracies.

“Today it is affecting me, but who’s to say that in a little while it won’t affect journalists, trade unions. That’s what’s at stake.”