http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/09/gambia-un-journalists-idUSL2E8D9BDJ20120209

Gambia asks UN to probe journalists' disappearance
By Louis Charbonneau

NEW YORK | Thu Feb 9, 2012 12:39pm EST

Feb 9 (Reuters) - Gambian President Yahya Jammeh has asked the United
Nations to investigate the disappearance of several journalists in the
tiny West African country that rights groups accuse of persecuting
media workers, the U.N. rights chief said.

"In response to civil society complaints about the disappearance of a
journalist in the Gambia, the president of Gambia asked for the U.N.
to come in and investigate," U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights
Navi Pillay said at a conference on Wednesday at Hunter College in New
York City.

Pillay's spokesman Rupert Colville confirmed that Jammeh's request
referred specifically to Chief Ebrima Manneh, who disappeared in 2006
after being picked up at the offices of his newspaper by men who said
they were state intelligence officers, and to one other reporter.

Colville did not respond immediately to a request on Thursday for
details about the identity of the second reporter.

It was not immediately clear what a U.N. investigation would entail
and why Jammeh, who has long ignored international appeals to secure
Manneh's release, was turning to the world body to deal with a matter
that would normally be handled by national authorities.

In November 2011, U.S. Senator Richard Durbin sent a letter to
Gambia's justice minister, Edward Gomez, appealing for Manneh's
release.

Durbin, who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee's
Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights and a
member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, sent a similar
letter to Jammeh in March 2010, according to the website of the New
York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).

In October 2011, Gomez was quoted in a local media report as saying
that Manneh was alive but was not in the custody of the Gambian
government.

CPJ, which has criticized Gambia for attacks on the press and Jammeh
for publicly vilifying reporters, says Manneh was sighted in
government custody in December 2006 and in July 2007.

According to CPJ, a leading press-freedom watchdog, Gambia has
resisted international appeals to free Manneh by, among others, six
U.S. senators, the U.N. Education, Scientific and Cultural
Organization, and the Court of Justice of the Economic Community of
West African States.

Amnesty International is among the human rights groups that have
called on Gambia to release Manneh. (Reporting By Louis Charbonneau;
Editing by Eric Beech)

--
-Laye
==============================
"With fair speech thou might have thy will,
With it thou might thy self spoil."
--The R.M

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