 |
|
|
On
Tuesday, less than a week after receiving an award for his journalism from the London-based freedom of
expression group Index on Censorship, veteran journalist Rafael Marques de
Morais will stand trial in Angola on charges of criminal defamation.
The
trial follows claims made by Marques de Morais in his book Blood Diamonds:
Torture and Corruption in Angola.
Published
in Portugal in 2011, it documents allegations of murders, torture, forced
displacement of civilian settlements, and intimidation of inhabitants of the diamond-mining areas of the Lundas
region of Angola, which was a Portuguese colony until 1975. In the book, the
journalist claimed that guards from a private security firm and members of the
Angolan military were responsible for the torture and killings, according to news reports.
After
the book was published, seven Angolan generals filed a criminal defamation suit
against Marques de Morais in Portugal. In February 2013, the Portuguese
Prosecution Service chose not to pursue the case, with the prosecutor stating
"the author's intention is clearly not to offend but to inform,"
according to news reports.
In
April 2013 the Organized Crime Unit of Angola's national police notified
Marques de Morais that he had been indicted on charges of defamation in
January.
The Committee to Protect Journalists, with a number of other
organizations, wrote
to the Angolan attorney general João Maria de Sousa, calling for the charges to
be dropped.
In
August 2013, CPJ joined other groups in a letter to the African Union's special rapporteur on freedom
of expression Pansy Tlakula and special rapporteur on human rights defenders
Reine Alapini-Gansou, asking them to urge Angola to halt the case.
The letter
highlighted how the proceedings are a violation of Marques de Morais' human
rights, in particular those protected by articles in the African Charter on
Human and Peoples Rights, the U.N.'s International Covenant on Civil and
Political Rights,
and Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The Media Legal Defence Initiative
(MLDI), a non-government organization that provides legal defense for
independent media, filed an urgent update to the appeal earlier this month.
In
December, the African Court on Human and People's Rights delivered a landmark
ruling that no journalist should be imprisoned for criminal defamation--a
judgment binding on all members of the African Union, which includes Angola.
The judgment upheld an
appeal to the continent's highest court by the Burkinabe journalist Lohé
Issa Konaté against his 2012 conviction for criminal defamation. The editor of L'Ouragan, who was
sentenced to one year in jail for reporting on allegations of corruption and
abuse by the state prosecutor in Burkina Faso, is now entitled to compensation
and Burkina Faso will have to change its criminal defamation laws, according to
MLDI, which represented Konaté.
Although
Angola is a member of the African Union, and its constitution guarantees
freedom of expression, a report released this month by the International Federation for Human Rights, which represents
more than 170 human rights groups around the world, found that journalists and
human rights defenders there are subject to "judicial and administrative
harassment, acts of intimidation, threats and other forms of restrictions to
their freedom of association and expression." As well as Marques de
Morais, other independent journalists have faced criminal defamation charges,
according to CPJ
research.
Marques
de Morais has long been the subject of state harassment by Angolan authorities.
In 2000 he was forbidden
to leave the country after a conviction for defaming President José Eduardo dos
Santos in a 1999 article, according to CPJ
research.
The action prompted CPJ to write a letter
of protest to the president. The Angolan Supreme Court suspended Marques de
Morais' six-month sentence but confiscated his passport until February 2001, news reports said.
Much
of Marques de Morais' reporting is published on Maka Angola,
an initiative he funds and directs himself, which is dedicated to "the
struggle against corruption and to the defense of democracy in Angola."
Although his book was published exclusively in Portugal, Marques de Morais told
the British daily, the Independent, he is taking 200 copies to Angola to
distribute before his trial in the capital, Luanda, and that the book was being
made freely available to download or read online in Angola.
Sue Valentine, CPJ's Africa program coordinator,
has worked as a journalist in print and radio in South Africa since the late
1980s, including at The Star
newspaper in Johannesburg and as the executive producer of a national daily
current affairs radio show on the SABC, South Africa's public broadcaster.
No comments:
Post a Comment