Rima Hassan was born to a Palestinian father and a Syrian mother in a refugee camp in Aleppo, Syria, leaving her stateless at birth. The granddaughter of Palestinians expelled from the Galilee village of Al-Birwa during the Nakba of 1948, she arrived in France as a child and has since built her political career around the conviction that the struggle for Palestinian liberation belongs as much in Europe as in Palestine.

Hassan belongs to a new generation of leaders in the Palestinian diaspora who are unwilling to soften their convictions to suit Western sensibilities. It is precisely because of this stance that the French state has deployed the full weight of its institutional machinery against her. Since entering office, 16 judicial proceedings have been filed against Hassan, the majority relating to charges of “apology for terrorism,” all concerning her remarks on Israel-Palestine.

The terrorism-related cases largely stem from Hassan’s public defense of the right of peoples under foreign occupation to resist, a principle recognized in UN resolutions. (The latest, for which she is currently standing trial, revolves around her sharing a post on X quoting Kōzō Okamoto, a Japanese militant who took part in an attack on Israel’s Ben-Gurion Airport in 1972 that killed 26 people. The quote read: “As long as there is oppression, resistance will not only be a right, but a duty.”) At the same time, she has consistently described the killing of civilians on October 7 as a war crime and condemned the taking of hostages.

Thirteen of the cases against her have already been dismissed. Hassan has nevertheless been summoned by police six times, spending a total of more than 45 hours in custody or interrogation. She has attended each summons without invoking her parliamentary immunity, in solidarity with ordinary citizens facing similar prosecutions without the same protections. During her recent detention in April, false claims that she had been found in possession of drugs were leaked to the media, generating a flurry of news reports before toxicology results — already in the prosecutor’s possession — cleared her completely.