http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/politics/68433-press-freedom-gains-ground-in-gambia-and-beyond

THE HILL

Press Freedom gains ground in Gambia and beyond
By Committee to Protect Journalists Washington Rep. Frank Smyth -
11/18/09 03:56 PM ET

Press Freedom gained ground this week from Washington to New York.
Yesterday, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee passed the Daniel
Pearl Freedom of the Press Act, which would compel the State
Department to broaden as well as deepen its reporting on press freedom
conditions worldwide to congress. Today, a group including global
luminaries Václav Havel and Desmond M. Tutu announced that a U.N.
monitoring body found the West African government of Gambia
responsible for the disappearance of a respected journalist there
known as “Chief Manneh.”

Journalist Embrima Manneh vanished in 2006 after two plainclothes
agents of Gambia’s National Intelligence Agency arrested him in his
office in Banjul at the Daily Observer newspaper. Manneh was led away
after he tried to republish a BBC report that was critical of Gambia’s
President, Yahya Jammeh, on the eve of an African Union summit. The
missing journalist was later spotted receiving medical treatment as a
prisoner in a hospital, according to CPJ sources. Although President
Jammeh and other Gambian officials have either denied knowledge of the
case or simply failed to respond to queries about it.


“This judgment by the United Nations adds a new and important voice to
the growing chorus of those calling for the immediate release of Chief
Ebrima Manneh who, for three long years, has been held incommunicado
and without charge or trial,” noted Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL) who
has long pressed Gambian officials about his disappearance. This year,
after Gambian officials refused to respond to him, Durbin, the Senate
Majority Whip who also sits on the Senate Appropriations committee,
inserted language into the latest operations bill that the
“incommunicado detention” of Chief Manneh “will be considered” when
“assessing continued United States assistance,” as was first broken by
the subscription-only-news-outlet Congressional Quarterly.

Last year,  a court for the regional Economic Community of West
African States declared Manneh’s disappearance to be in violation of
international law. Now the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary
Detention has similarly found the government’s handling of the case to
be without legal justification.

“The U.N. Working Group has affirmed that this is a violation of the
most basic human rights,” said Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI), Chairman
of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Subcommittee on African
Affairs. “If the Gambian government does not immediately release
Manneh or provide information about his whereabouts, the international
community should take action to make clear this is unacceptable.”

Unfortunately, the case is hardly rare. Another critical journalist,
Deyda Hydara, was murdered in 2004. Not only does his case remain
unsolved, but President Jammeh seems to have dismissed the murder out
of hand along with any need to investigate who killed him. The
government, he said in June on The Gambian Radio and Television
Service, "has for long been accused by the international community and
so-called human rights organisations for the murder of Deyda Hydara,
but we have no stake in this issue.”

Journalists who have even published a press union statement
criticizing the government’s handling of that murder case have found
themselves facing trumped up sedition charges. President Jammeh
recently pardoned six journalists who had been sentenced to paying
heavy fines along with two years in prison. But he told Agence
France-Presse that the released journalists and others should "desist
from being seditious and remember they are accountable."

The case against Gambia over the disappearance of Chief Manneh was
brought by Freedom Now, an advocacy group whose honorary co-chairs are
Havel and Tutu and whose pro bono staff of international law experts
have worked to free prisoners of conscience worldwide. “We are
strongly encouraged that the Working Group has issued a clear and
direct opinion in support of Mr. Manneh,” said Freedom Now Chairman
Jeremy Zucker. “We urge the Gambian government to release Mr. Manneh
immediately.”

If the legislation named after the late Wall Street Journal reporter
Daniel Pearl makes it into law, the State Department would be required
to detail at length cases like Manneh’s in a new, separate annual
report to congress. Introduced by Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), who is
founder and co-chair of the Congressional Caucus for Freedom of the
Press, the Daniel Pearl Act passed the House in June.

Yesterday, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee passed a similar
version of the bill. The House version, besides requiring expanding
press freedom reporting to congress, would have also included U.S.
funding for independent media in different nations. But Senate
Democrats knew that Senate Republicans led by John McCain (R-AZ)
already had a lock against passing any legislation that would increase
spending, according to congressional staffers. The committee-approved
bill that may now go to the Senate floor focuses on U.S. government
monitoring of press freedom conditions worldwide.

The language in the Daniel Pearl Act up for full Senate consideration,
such as “the identification of countries where there are…direct
physical threats, imprisonment,” seems to be written specifically for
cases like the Gambia’s still-missing “Chief Manneh.”

Note: CPJ is a worldwide watchdog that accepts no government funds as
it defends the rights of journalists everywhere to report the news
without fear of reprisal.

Source:
http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/politics/68433-press-freedom-gains-ground-in-gambia-and-beyond
The contents of this site are © 2009 Capitol Hill Publishing Corp., a
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