Bamba Laye,
 
Thanks for sharing this exhilarating story. Jammeh will learn the hard way that he cannot dispose of human life and expect to go scott free. Not now. Not in this day and age. We will all continue to urge the UN and other international bodies to force Jammeh to account for Deyda and Chief Manneh, among other victims of his despotism. He will problably end up being charged with crimes against humanity. Thanks.
 
Baba
 
> Date: Thu, 19 Nov 2009 11:55:48 +0400
> From: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Fw: Press Freedom gains ground in Gambia and beyond
> To: [log in to unmask]
>
> 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
> subsisiary of News Communications, Inc.
>
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