France: three years of legal harassment for journalist Ariane Lavrilleux, a troubling sign that journalism is being criminalised

There's been a new twist in the Ariane Lavrilleux case, three years after she was targeted by a judicial investigation for her contributions to a series of investigations released on Disclose between in 2021 about a secret French military operation in Egypt. The reports alleged that Egyptian authorities misused the military operation to target and kill civilians. In October 2025 Lavrilleux was later cleared of all charges the public prosecutor's office filed an appeal requesting to reopen the investigation and indict the journalist. The appeal also requests that the three other co-authors of the investigation be interrogated by the court and that the articles in question and a documentary about the investigation aired on the TV programme "Complément d'enquête" on France 2 be removed from the websites of Disclose and France 2 and no longer be available to the public. The Paris Court of Appeal's decision will be announced on 8 July.

For her reporting, journalist Ariane Lavrilleux was held in police custody for 39 hours in September 2023 on charges of violating national defence secrets and revealing information that could lead to the identification of "a protected agent". Police searched her home for over ten hours, tracked her geolocation and monitored her professional and private activities. Lavrilleux was first summoned to the Paris Judicial Court in January 2025. In October 2025, the investigating judge dismissed all charges, ruling that the articles she had co-authored were "in the public interest, of interest to the public, and relevant to democratic debate."

The criminalisation of journalism is a phenomenon rapidly spreading worldwide, and RSF calls for strengthened legal protection and ambitious criminal justice policies. Twenty-five years after the attacks of 11 September 2001 in the United States, the expansion of the scope of national security and defence secrecy has become a means of prohibiting coverage of topics of public interest in many countries. This trend, which is particularly noticeable in authoritarian regimes, has spread widely in democracies and is accompanied by the abusive use of laws against journalists.