Sipping his fresh lemonade while his journalist's satchel lays on the ground, Redouane* has the look of a defeated man whose hard-fought project has just been squashed. Sitting on a shaded terrace in the heart of Algiers, between Place Maurice-Audin and the Grande Poste, the young Franco-Algerian talked about the entertainment magazine he wanted to launch. His hopes were dashed when a new law on information was published in the official bulletin on August 29, prohibiting dual nationals from owning shares in media outlets.
And yet, he believed the promise Abdelmadjid Tebboune made when he was elected head of the Algerian state in December 2019 to draft a new law on information. Among the changes that were announced was to free media founders from the obligation of requesting approval from the Ministry of Communication. On March 28, when the bill was passed by the People's National Assembly, creating a print or electronic media outlet became subject to a simple "declaration," while the audiovisual and radio sectors still required authorization.
"I expected this progress to come with a few constraints," explained Redouane. "But it wasn't until a few days before the vote in the Assembly that I started getting worried: The official press agency presented journalists as if they were foreign affairs officials tasked with conveying a good image of Algeria."
His concerns proved well-founded, as he was flabbergasted to discover that the law prohibits those who do not have "exclusively the Algerian nationality" from owning shares in a media outlet. According to the Algerian news website interlignes.com, only lawmakers from the Movement of Society for Peace (MSP, formerly the Movement for the Islamic Society) rejected the bill in the Assembly, calling it "the confiscation of a right enshrined in the Constitution."
Salim*, who advises clients in Lyon and Algiers, recalled that his contacts in the president's office were "not even aware of this text's existence" at the time. He thought the head of state would never accept the law. After all, didn't President Tebboune make "a diaspora fully involved in the national revival process" item number 51 of his list of 54 "commitments"? A not exclusively Algerian diaspora to which the president repeated his message in 2022 and 2023 during trips to Russia, Turkey and Portugal.
But the Constitutional Council found no issues with the law, which was published in the official bulletin five months after its adoption by the Assembly. Salim now wants someone close to him to take over his audiovisual media project. The new law cautions both the designated owner and the recipient in such situations, as they can now face a penalty ranging from one to two million dinars (equivalent to €6,700 to €13,500 euros).
You have 57.87% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.