New York, January 20, 2012--Two Senegalese journalists with the private daily Le Quotidien were handed suspended prison sentences this week in a criminal libel case over their coverage of an armed insurgency in a separatist province, according to news reports.
Committee to Protect Journalists
Senegal
The Senegalese state-controlled radio and TV Corporation, Radio Télévision Sénégalaise (RTS), is experiencing an internal struggle for editorial freedom as Senegal moves toward a presidential election on February 26, 2012.
Senegalese journalists say justice is not on their side when they are victims of abuse by powerful officials or security forces. I met recently in Dakar with journalists targeted with criminal acts in apparent reprisal for their work. In these two high-profile cases, CPJ has found evidence of political influence on the judiciary.
New York, April 14, 2011--A magistrate in the Senegalese capital, Dakar, found investigative journalist Abdou Latif Coulibaly guilty of criminal defamation today in connection with 2010 stories alleging fraudulent transactions between an agricultural business and the government, according to local journalists. Coulibaly is already appealing a suspended prison term in connection with a separate defamation case.
Fifty years after independence, the profession of journalism seems to have retained its prestige with the general public in
Letters
| Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Gabon, Ivory Coast, Madagascar, Mali, Niger, Republic of Congo, Senegal, Togo
Your Excellencies: As you gather in Paris for festivities that celebrate your nations’ 50 years of independence, we, the undersigned African press freedom advocates petition for your public commitment to a free, vibrant, and self-sustaining press as a cornerstone of the development of francophone Africa in the next five decades.
Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade has written a response to a recent CPJ protest letter. While we welcome his attention to the issues we raised about press freedom last month, we note with great concern the president’s comments about the ongoing criminal case of two journalists assaulted by police in 2008.
Dear Mr. President: The Committee to Protect Journalists is heartened by your recent directive to the prime minister to renew consultations with the press on the decriminalization of press offenses in Senegal. Yet your directive came on the same day a judge in the central town of Kaolack imprisoned two journalists who reported allegations of local government corruption in the distribution of seeds—a reminder of the urgent need for press law reform.
A year ago last week in Senegal, two reporters
covering a soccer match were assaulted with tasers, handcuffed, and abused by
police officers after the reporters refused to halt a post-game interview at
Léopold Sédar Senghor Stadium in the capital, Dakar. A year on, Senegalese law
enforcement has fallen short in bringing to account those responsible for this and
other abuses against the media.
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