Tuesday 25 December 2007
The year 2007 will not have been a good vintage for freedom of the press in France. Added to the economic difficulties that confront a number of newspapers comes increased pressure from the legal system to constrain journalists to reveal their sources.
Two ongoing affairs bear witness to that issue. The most recent concerns "Le Télégramme." This Breton daily revealed on Friday, December 21, that one of its journalists had refused - as the penal code gives him the right to do - to divulge to police the source of an article bearing on a murder connected to the Nantes milieu. Under order of the prosecutor, the telecommunications company Orange supplied the police with a record of the journalist's cell phone calls. That communication took place with neither the person concerned nor his hierarchy being informed.
Orange puts forward the electronic postal and communications code to justify its collaboration with the police and its silence towards its customer.
This matter is worrying. While state security is demonstrably not in danger, the legal system is using methods that recall the pressure the Beijing regime brings to bear on suppliers of Internet access.
The other affair is equally serious. A journalist was indicted in December for having published an April 2007 article in Le Monde about a French secret services analysis explaining channels and procedures of the al-Qaeda network before the September 11, 2001, attacks. In this case also, the police and justice department absolutely want to know the journalist's sources.
Unfortunately, these affairs are not exceptional. In recent years, journalists from "Le Point," "Le Parisien," "L'Equipe," "France 3" and "Midi libre" have had run-ins with the law, which did not contest the validity of the news they reported, but wanted to know its source. Searches have been carried out, of both the journalists' newsrooms and their homes.
The justice system does not promote democracy this way. Quite the contrary. As "Le Télégramme" notes, the European Court of Human Rights deems that protection of sources is the keystone to freedom of the press. Ministers - both of justice and of communication - regularly pretend to be upset about outrages against press rights. Unfortunately, in spite of their professed good intentions, no decision has been rendered to arrest this development. Quite the opposite.
Attacks on freedom of the press are increasing in the name of security. But the stakes go far beyond that sector alone. History shows that freedom of the press and freedom for citizens are intimately connected.
Niger: Two French Reporters Risk the Death Penalty
By Julien Martin
Rue89
Monday 24 December 2007
For entering the rebel Touareg region in the North, they've been accused of attacking state security.
For wanting to report on the Touareg rebellion in Niger, Thomas Dandois and Pierre Creisson, two French journalists, were arrested a week ago by the country's authorities. Their situation worsened Friday when they learned they were being charged with "attacking the security of the state" - a crime punishable by the death penalty.
To publicize their case and demand an end to their imprisonment, the journalists' two brothers, as well as their employers, held a press conference this Monday at Reporters Without Borders' headquarters. [A video clip of the press conference is available at the Rue89 site.]
Thomas Dandois and Pierre Creisson work for the Camicas Productions agency and were working on a reportage for Arte. In Niger for several weeks, they were refused visas to go to the Northern region. When the Niger authorities learned that they had decided nonetheless to go there, they tracked them during their entire reportage before arresting them in the company of their driver, Al Hassane Abdourahmann, once the interviews with the rebels were completed.
Imprisoned in the Kollo penal colony, 25 kilometers southwest of the capital, Niamey, they are being defended locally by Master Moussa Coulibaly, who Saturday denounced "a serious step backward for freedom and government of laws" to the AFP:
"As far as I know, no investigation or charges have been filed against [the Touareg rebels], although all those who approach them from near or far are prosecuted for the most serious crimes."
Touareg rebels, who, under the banner of the Movement of Nigerians for Justice (MNJ), are clashing with the Niger Army in the North. The region has been strictly forbidden to journalists since August, and President Mamadou Tandja extended a "state of emergency" by three months at the end of November.
Also demanding the two journalists' liberation, the National Reporters Union hopes that Niger does not become "a prison for journalists." Already in September, French reporter François Bergeron was jailed in Niger, accused of the same crime, but he enjoyed a presidential pardon.
The Niger jails also hold two local journalists suspected of complicity with the MNJ. Moussa Kaka, correspondent for Radio France Internationale (RFI), and Ibrahim Manzo Diallo, director of the bimonthly "Aïr-Info," have been imprisoned respectively since September 26 and October 9.
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