Published on 3 February 2010
26 February 2010 - Website editor freed under presidential pardon
14 January 2010 - Website editor still held three weeks after completing prison sentence
29 December 2009 - Website editor still held after completing six-month jail sentence
19 March 2010 - Does blocking of independent radio station’s website herald start of Internet censorship by Algeria?
18 March 2010 - Web 2.0 versus Control 2.0
17 March 2010 - Blogger’s death in detention still unexplained one year later
Reporters Without Borders reiterates its call for the immediate release of the Hanevy Ould Dehah, the editor of the website Taqadoumy, and the withdrawal of all the charges against him. Dehah is being retried on the same charges on which he has already served a six-month sentence. The trial opened on 1 February and the next hearing is scheduled for tomorrow.
The court should be acting as if last summer’s trial never took place. It has ordered the prosecutor’s office to correct procedural errors denounced by Dehah’s lawyer, but it has not ruled on his arbitrary detention or, as yet, the substance of the case.
“The authorities need to realise that they are being monitored closely both within Mauritania and abroad,” Reporters Without Borders said. “They must demonstrate the independence of their judicial system by clearing Dehah and restoring him to the freedom that is rightly his.”
Dehah should have been released on 24 December on completing a six-month sentence on a trumped-up charge of “offending public decency” (http://www.rsf.org/Website-editor-gets-six-months-in.html) but the authorities, who are clearly bent on persecuting him, have continued to hold him in a manifestly illegal manner ever since (http://www.rsf.org/Website-editor-still-held-three.html).
Reporters Without Borders interviews in French with Hacen Ould Lebatt, the editor of the French section of the Taqadoumy website, on 8 January and Brahim Ould Ebety, Dehah’s lawyer, on 13 January can be viewed at the foot of the 14 January release (http://www.rsf.org/Website-editor-still-held-three.html).
In September 2001, the Eritrean government ordered that all of the country’s privately owned publications be closed down. In the days that followed, police arrested above fifteen or so journalists and took them to Asmara’s police station No.
