Rebuking 5-year sentence, France urges Algeria to pardon Sansal: What to know

France’s prime minister called on Algeria to pardon an imprisoned dissident writer on Tuesday after an Algerian court upheld his five-year prison sentence.

What happened: On Tuesday, an Algerian court upheld the five-year prison sentence for writer Boualem Sansal, a dual French-Algerian citizen jailed in Algeria since November. Sansal was sentenced in March for undermining national unity after he told the right-wing French news outlet Frontieres that France had unjustly transferred Moroccan…