State secrets: Disclose journalist taken into custody
On Tuesday 19 September, journalist Ariane Lavrilleux was taken into custody and her home searched by the DGSI. The aim of this unacceptable attack on freedom of the press was to identify Disclose’s sources, who helped to reveal the military operation “Sirli”, carried out by France in Egypt on behalf of the dictatorship.
A search of the home of Ariane Lavrilleux, a journalist with Disclose and co-author of the “Egypt Papers” series of investigations, began at 6am on Tuesday 19 September. Accompanied by an examining magistrate, police officers from the French intelligence service (DGSI) took the journalist into custody as part of an investigation into compromising national defence secrets and revealing information that could lead to the identification of a protected agent, which was opened in July 2022.
The aim of this latest episode of unacceptable intimidation of Disclose journalists is clear: to identify our sources who helped reveal the Sirli military operation in Egypt. In November 2021, Disclose relied on several hundred “top secret” documents to unveil a campaign of arbitrary executions orchestrated by the Egyptian dictatorship of Marshal Al-Sissi, with the complicity of the French state.
Many organisations reacted to support Ariane Lavrilleux and the Disclose editorial team. Reporters Without Borders expressed concern on X (formerly Twitter) that “the DGSI’s actions undermine the confidentiality of sources”. “It is very worrying that the work of journalists focusing on the opaque field of defence is almost systematically investigated by the DGSI”, said Amnesty International France.
The journalists’ associations of Mediapart and France Télévisions also lent their support to Ariane Lavrilleux, denouncing an “intolerable attack on the confidentiality of sources”. For its part, the European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) announced that it would be filing an alert on the Council of Europe’s platform for the safety of journalists. “This alert will force the French government to respond to an intolerable attack on press freedom”, explained its Secretary General, Ricardo Gutiérrez, to Disclose.
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