HHistorians, philosophers, activists, writers, psychologists, lawyers, teachers, academics, economists, journalists, we all have in common to have published at La Fabrique. We are attached to this publishing house, founded twenty-five years ago by Eric Hazan, whose catalog is both rich and demanding.
We learned with dismay of the arrest of its foreign rights manager, Ernest M., in London on April 17, when he was on his way to the London Book Fair, a major literary event in Europe, to publicize the house catalog. This fair is not just a commercial event. The presence of publishers like La Fabrique is an essential counterweight to the overexposure of industrial publishing on an international scale.
Ernest was arrested as he exited his train at St. Pancras station, London, under anti-terrorism legislation, Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000. This provision, denounced in Great Britain by human rights associations, makes it possible to“arrest, question, search and, if necessary, detain persons [sans] no prior authorization or suspicion”. It also makes it possible to seize electronic devices and retrieve their data without any justification.
Without any proof
Ernest had his phone and work computer confiscated. During his interrogation, he was questioned in particular about the “anti-government authors at La Fabrique”. He was asked to provide his access codes to his computer devices, which he refused to do. As a result, he is now subject to proceedings for obstructing an anti-terrorism investigation.
We must take a step back to measure the danger that such a procedure represents, for us, authors linked to this house, and for democratic freedoms in general. We have here particularly liberticidal legislation – one of the harshest in Europe – which makes it possible to launch an anti-terrorist investigation “without suspicion”.
It allows the authorities to suck up all your data without any serious evidence or leads in the event that they might find something suspicious in it. Since the questions posed to Ernest concern French politics and the positions of the authors of La Fabrique, one can imagine that the French services seized a well-chosen opportunity to obtain the data from a potentially embarrassing publisher without legal reason. .
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