Press Freedom gains ground in Gambia and beyond

“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.