After leaving Japan on April 4, 2019 and still in shock the way her husband’s rearrest took place, Carole Ghosn has been speaking out repeatedly and denouncing the behaviour of Japanese prosecutors and the hostage’s justice system.
It is on April 06, 2019, that she first tells French Sunday Newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche the details of the search and describes it as a humiliation of having been treated like a criminal.
On April 8, 2019, she launches a solemn appeal to Emmanuel Macron, President of the French Republic:
“He needs to get my husband out of jail. He’s already done 111 days. France is the great country of human rights and now, we don’t feel that there are human rights in France. I don’t want my husband to be above the law, I simply want him to be judged fairly.”
Carole Ghosn – le 08 avril 2019
To which the French government will simply respond by saying that “Carlos Ghosn is a citizen like any other. Justice is taking its course, in France as in Japan. The government does not have a say on these legal matters by virtue of the separation of powers. The government, however, remains vigilant for the respect of the rights and integrity of Carlos Ghosn as a French citizen”.
Though, having nothing to hide, Carole Ghosn nevertheless returned to Japan on April 11, 2019, to answer the request for questioning from Japanese prosecutors.
Once heard and released without anything held against her, Carole Ghosn has no further reason to remain in Japan. Her husband has returned to prison in solitary confinement, she decides to leave the archipelago to continue the counter-offensive on the human rights violations and to denounce the inertia, in particular of the French government, by stating that “everyone has abandoned Carlos Ghosn” and that he is being held in cruel conditions.
As an American citizen and aware of the influence of the United States in its bilateral relations with Japan, Carole Ghosn also made a call to Donald Trump on April 11, 2019, in an op-ed published in the Washington Post.
On the legal side the fight goes on as well. Indeed, François Zimeray, Carlos Ghosn’s human rights lawyer, reminded that “Carlos Ghosn is punished like a great criminal before being judged” on Radio Classique. This is what will motivate a new referral to the United Nations denouncing the behaviour of Japanese prosecutors.
Finally, the call by 1,000 Japanese lawyers to put an end to the hostage justice system resonates as a growing protest within the Japanese archipelago itself.