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The Eritrean government should immediately release nine jailed journalists who have been in detention without charge since September 2001, Human Rights Watch said today.

The journalists were detained after the authorities banned all private and independent publications in Eritrea in September 2001. They began a hunger strike in late March to protest their detention, and on April 3 were transferred from Police Station One in Asmara to an undisclosed location. Eleven political dissidents imprisoned in harsh conditions since September 2001 also remain in custody.

“Suppression of the independent press means that the Eritrean people have no access to information except from government sources,” said Peter Takirambudde, executive director of the Africa division of Human Rights Watch.

The Eritrean government should immediately release the journalists and political dissidents or charge them with a recognizable criminal offense. They should be held in an acknowledged, legally established place of detention pending release, with access to relatives and lawyers. The government should also lift the ban on the independent press.

The government closed all independent press outlets in September 2001, and arrested ten journalists without charge. Two others fled the country to evade arrest. The ten were initially held at a police station in Asmara, the capital. According to a message smuggled out of the police station, after six months without charge they began a hunger strike on March 31, 2001, demanding release or public trial. Nine of the journalists were then whisked away to a secret location where they are being held incommunicado. (The tenth journalist, a Swedish national by the name of Dawit Isaac, was taken to hospital, reportedly because of injuries from torture.) The detained journalists include Yosef Mohamed Ali, Amanuel Asrat, and Said Abdulkadir, chief editors respectively of the Tsigenay, Zemen, and Admas newspapers.

In addition, the Eritrean government also has arrested anyone suspected of supporting critics of the president, Isayas Afewerki, or of calling for democratic reform. In a mid-2001 crackdown, the government arrested eleven senior government officials after the release of their letter to the president in May 2001 criticizing him and pressing for full implementation of the constitution and other reforms. (Two signatories were outside the country at the time of the arrests; two others recanted.) The eleven are still in detention.

After students at the University of Asmara protested mismanagement of a summer work program, the government also arrested the president of the student union in July 2001. Those arrests were followed by the arrest of prominent elderly businessmen who attempted to mediate between the president and his critics. The pace of arrests quickened in March and April 2002 when the government began to arrest military officers and other suspected dissidents—including three employees of the government press. There are reportedly between sixty and eighty persons in detention apparently because of their criticism of the government, in addition to the detained officials and journalists.

International human rights law recognizes the fundamental principles that detainees have the right to be free of torture and mistreatment, and that no one shall be subjected to prolonged arbitrary detention by the government.

“Now that the Eritrea/Ethiopia war is formally over, and both governments have accepted the arbitration decision on the border dispute, the Eritrean government has run out of excuses for refusing to apply the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its own constitution’s guarantees,” said Takirambudde.

The Eritrean constitution, drafted in 1997 but not yet promulgated, contains essential human rights guarantees such as the right of a detainee to be brought before a court within forty-eight hours of arrest, to petition for a writ of habeas corpus, and to be informed of the grounds for arrest (Article 17(3)-(5)). It also prohibits cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment for detainees or prisoners (Article 16(2)). These rights parallel those in international law.

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