Macron exchanges a long handshake with Bin Salmán upon his arrival at the Elysee Palace

July 28 () –

French President Emmanuel Macron exchanged a long handshake with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman upon his arrival at the Elysee Palace for a “working dinner” on Thursday night.

Macron has preferred to greet the crown prince like this, with a smile, in contrast to the fist bump of the president of the United States, Joe Biden, two weeks ago, a highly criticized gesture, despite the coldness shown by the faces of both leaders .

This visit comes after the crown prince met on Tuesday with the Greek Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, in the Greek capital, Athens, to promote bilateral cooperation in the framework of the first stop of his first tour of countries of the European Union since the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashogi, assassinated in 2018 in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.

“I understand all those who are attentive to issues of human rights and freedom, and these will undoubtedly be messages that the President of the Republic (Macron) will transmit to Mohamed bin Salmán,” the French Prime Minister said before the meeting. , Elisabeth Borne, to Franceinfo.

In this sense, he pointed out that it is important, given the current fuel crisis due to the war between Russia and Ukraine, that these “exchanges exist without in any way renouncing our objectives, our values ​​and respect for Human Rights” .

The crown prince’s trip to France, however, has caused unrest in international organizations. Thus, the human rights organization Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), together with the Open Social Justice Initiative –OSJI, for its acronym in English– and the NGO TRIAL International, have filed a criminal complaint in France against Bin Salman.

Specifically, the text, presented this Thursday in the French courts by DAWN, an organization created by Jashogi himself in June 2018, contemplates in its 42 pages that the Saudi crown prince is “accomplice in the torture and forced disappearance” of the journalist, for what it implies “crimes subject to internal prosecution” in France.

The opposition has also responded to Bin Salmán’s controversial visit. “He says that we are willing to compromise the values ​​we have for oil. Saudi Arabia, which is the country that punishes homosexuality with the death penalty, which brazenly kills the civilian population of Yemen”, criticized the green deputy Sandrine Rousseau .

In addition, the parliamentarian of the far-right National Rally party, Julien Odoul, has pointed out that “Macron’s moralistic policy weakens the French people before the Russian people”, although “with Saudi Arabia there are no values, there are no Human Rights and women’s rights “.

The general secretary of Amnesty International, Agnès Callamard, has also expressed herself in the same terms, who has said that “it is possible to negotiate” with Saudi Arabia, although it is not necessary to “rehabilitate a murderous prince”, according to the BFMTV network.

For his part, the secretary general of Reporters Without Borders, Christophe Deloire, has asked France in a statement to intervene with Bin Salmán for the release of the 27 journalists who are currently detained in the country.

“Almost four years after the murder of journalist Jamal Jashogi, the reintegration of Mohamed ben Salmane into international relations cannot be carried out in defiance of truth and justice,” he added, focusing on the case of informant Raif Badawi.

This journalist, who is now 38 years old, was arrested in 2012 for criticizing the Saudi religious police through social networks, for which he was sentenced to ten years in prison and received a thousand lashes for his “insults” to Islam.

“The blogger is now subject to a ban on leaving the territory for another few years. His wife and children, exiled in Canada, have multiplied calls (to achieve this),” Reporters Without Borders said.

“MBS (Mohamed bin Salmán) can apparently count on Emmanuel Macron to rehabilitate him on the international scene, despite the heinous murder of journalist Jamal Khashogi,” Human Rights Watch France director Bénédicte Jeannerod wrote on Twitter. lamenting a “double standard”.