122 Journalists in prison across the world

While the world’s attention and support is going out to those journalists, media workers and reporters that are kept hostage in Iraq, many tend to forget the hundreds of journalists worldwide who are kept being held behind bars. Because of their opinions, their dissident voices and critical points of view.

Last year the international organization Reporters Without Borders counted 807 cases of inlawful imprisonment of journalists worldwide. At the moment of writing 122 journalists are in jail around the world, in amongst other Burma (5), China (31), Cuba (24), Democratic Republic of Congo (3), Eritrea (13), and Iran (6).

China, with 32 cases last year, is without a doubt the worst offender for jailing journalists. Cuba was ranked second for imprisoning 24 reporters in 2005, followed by Eritrea, Ethiopia and Uzbekistan.

Journalists in US cells

According to The Committee to Protect Journalists The United States - the land of the free, home of the brave that proclaims be a fighter for and deliverer of freedom - is an important offender as well. Last year, six journalists were in US custody - four of them at detention centers in Iraq and one at the US military prison in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

The journalist held in Guantanamo Bay is Sami Al Haj, a Sudanese national and a cameraman of the Arab information network Al-Jazeera. He was arrested by the United States in 2001 and deported to Guantanamo Bay in 2002. He is accused of being an ‘enemy combatant’ and of making videos of Osama bin Laden. He has not had a trial yet.

Thirty-three years behind bars

He is not the only one that has been in jail for a very long time. There are other journalists and media people who have been imprisoned for many years. The Lybian journalist and writer Abdullah Ali Al-Sanussi Al-Darrat was arrested in 1973, and is therefore the journalist who has been imprisoned longest in the world. No one knows how he is doing, if he has had a fair trial, what his sentence was, where he is being held and whether or not he is alive: The Lybian authorities are reluctant on giving out information.

Or Chen Renjie and from Lin Youping, two Chinese journalists, who were arrested in 1983 for contra-revolutionary activities and who have been in prison ever since.

Tortured

Win Tin (75) from Burma has been in prison since 1989, serving a 20-year sentence for subversion and anti-government propaganda. Plus: he was one of the political mentors of Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, who herself isn’t particularly loved by Burmese authorities either. Win Tin was often offered freedom in exchange for a signed declaration to give up politics. He refused every single time.

Last but certainly not least: The Egyptian journalist Abd al-Manim Gamal al Din Abd al-Munim was arrested in February 1993 at his home and taken to Egypt’s security head quarters for investigation on fundamentalist activities. Here, he was tortured for an entire day before taken to prison in Cairo. Although there is no evidence against him and he never was accused of involvement in violence, Abd al-Manim Gamal al Din Abd al-Munim remains in a prison in Cairo.

These journalists mentioned above form the top of the iceberg. A massive iceberg that does not seem to make any move to melt down.


Miriam Mannak / Africa in the News - Cape Town, South Africa