Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki (left) in the Sudanese capital,
Khartoum, on June 11, 2015. Media lobby group Reporters Without
Borders/Sweden wants Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki to explain the
continued incarceration of journalist Dawit Isaak and his colleagues.
PHOTO | AFP
Media lobby group Reporters Without Borders/Sweden wants
Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki to explain the continued incarceration
of journalist Dawit Isaak and his colleagues.
They have been held since 2001.
In
a letter to the Eritrean leader, signed by board member Björn Tunbäck,
the group reminds President Isaias of the case before the African
Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights for Mr Dawit, a Swedish-Eritrean
journalist, and his colleagues. The letter further calls on the
president to lift the ban on a free press in Eritrea.
“The
Commission also tasked us, as part of the case, to follow up on the
decision, since we have written a number of letters to President Isaias,
his adviser, some of his ministers and to the Eritrean Embassy in
Stockholm, but no one has replied," says the letter.
Eritrea
has ranked bottom of the Press Freedom Index since Reporters Without
Borders began publishing it in 2002. The Horn of Africa country is one
of the worst jailers of journalists in the world.
Mr
Dawit and several of his colleagues are among the journalists held for
the longest time in the world, without being charged or sentenced.
The continental Commission, in the case Dawit
Isaak vs Eritrea (428/12) that became public in 2017, found Eritrea to
have violated six articles in the African Charter on Human and Peoples’
Rights. The case had been brought to the Commission in 2012 by three
jurists — Mr Jesús Alcalá, Mr Percy Bratt and Ms Prisca Orsonneau.
Reporters Without Borders supported the suit for the Eritrean detainees.
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