It has not been a good week for press freedom in Africa: three journalists in Morocco have been given jail sentences; an Algerian court has handed down sentences to a journalist and an editor, and an AFP reporter in Equatorial Guinea has been detained.
In the Morocco case, a magazine has been shut down and three of its journalists given jail sentences for showing insufficient respect for the king and citicising the monarchy, the MAP news agency reported on Tuesday.
The three, who worked for the weekly Al Hayat Al Maghribia, were sentenced by a court in Oujda in the east of the country on Monday.
The magazine was ordered to be closed down for two months. They were prosecuted after it published an interview in May with Mohamed al-Abbadi, a member of the governing council of the country’s chief Islamist organisation Al Adl Wal Ihssane, which is tolerated but not officially recognised.
Abbadi, who was tried with the journalists, was given a prison term of two years.
All four defendants were fined 10 000 dirhams ($1 050) and were also charged with ”inciting, through printed matter, acts likely to harm interior security.”
Mustapha Qachnini, director and editor of the magazine, was given a two-year term, while Miloud Boutriki and Abdelaziz Jellouli, who carried out the interviews, received 18 months each.
All four were left at liberty pending an appeal.
Qachnini had already been given a jail sentence of one year in August for publishing articles regarded as incitements to commit crimes harmful to the internal security of the state.
He is awaiting the outcome of an appeal.
Meanwhile, in An Algerian court convicted a journalist and his editor on Tuesday for ”offending the chief of state” with an article about an alleged real estate scam by officials close to President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, their newspaper said.
Farid Alilat, editor of Liberte daily, was handed a four-month suspended sentence and a 100 000 dinar ($1 380) fine, staff at the newspaper said. Reporter Rafik Hamou was fined the same amount, and the newspaper was ordered to pay two-million dinars ($27 500).
In July, Liberte published an article about an investigative report by another newspaper, El Khabar, alleging that many officials and others close to Bouteflika had been allowed to buy government-owned real estate at ridiculously low prices.
It has not been clear why El Khabar was not prosecuted. Liberte stunned many by running its article under the front-page headline, ”They’re all thieves.”
Liberte’s defence lawyers boycotted the trial after they were denied a request to push it back to a later date.
Both Liberte and El Khabar were among nine papers who recently protested what they called a wave of judicial and police harassment of the press. The newspapers refused to publish editions for one day in September, saying official pressure was mounting against papers critical of the North African nation’s government.
The correspondent in Equatorial Guinea for Agence France-Presse (AFP) was Tuesday still in detention and no reasons have been given for his detention, his wife said.
Rodrigo Angue Nguema, a citizen of the former Spanish colony, was arrested on Monday and spent the night in a police station in the capital Malabo, his wife said in Libreville.
She said she had been able to bring a meal to her husband and to talk with him briefly. He told her he was well but had not yet been questioned by police, who have not said why he was being detained.
The media lobby group Reporters Sans Frontieres (RSF, Reporters Without Borders) said in its 2003 annual report that ”the press is still not free in Equatorial Guinea.
”Independent journalists are constantly harassed and several fled the country for fear of reprisals. The government has the state-owned media entirely under its control,” it added. – Sapa-AFP