80-year-old Sansal was sentenced to five years in prison at the end of March. The prosecutor appealed and demanded a ten-year prison sentence.
On Tuesday, a court upheld the five-year prison sentence.
Sansal writes in French and has received several international literary awards. He was arrested in Algiers in November last year.
Sansal was prosecuted for crimes against national security under Article 87 of the Algerian Penal Code. It is a paragraph that is heavily criticized for being used against regime critics and human rights defenders, according to, among others, Swedish Pen, which has demanded that the prosecution against Sansal be dropped.
The prosecution against Sansal came after he said in an interview, among other things, that France wrongly ceded Moroccan territory to Algeria. The guilty verdict has led to a strained relationship between France and Algeria.
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