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V. Restrictions on Free Expression and Information Exchange

Tight government control over information about the conflict has been a particular feature of the fighting in 2008. In the view of one journalist, the government’s tactics changed as the Huthi rebels began to increase their media efforts in 2007.¹²⁰ The government imposed a near-complete blockade on the travel of persons and goods in and out of Sa’da governorate, principally by closing the main road connecting Sa’da to San’a via ‘Amran. Occasionally, persons fleeing fighting and destruction were able to move south.¹²¹

The government also attempted to prevent news about the details of the conflict from becoming public by preventing journalists and humanitarian workers from going to the conflict zone, by disconnecting all but a select number of mobile telephone numbers, by threatening journalists not to report on the conflict, and by arresting persons who transmitted information about the impact of the fighting, or who could have such information because they had recently left the area. Foreign Minister Abu Bakr al-Qurbi told Human Rights Watch, “We have to differentiate between freedom of expression and journalistic crimes. In any case, we have to accept a court’s verdict.”¹²²

Few arrests result in formal charges, much less guilty verdicts. A notable exception is the prosecution of Abd al-Karim al-Khaiwani, whom the Specialized Criminal Court in June 2008 sentenced to six years in prison for writing critical articles about the war in 2007.¹²³ Fellow journalists and lawyers familiar with the trial, including one who was part of the defense team, could not say what the precise legal charge against al-Khaiwani was.¹²⁴ President Saleh pardoned and released al-Khaiwani on September 25, 2008.

Legal standards

The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights guarantees the right “to hold opinions without interference”¹²⁵ and to freedom of expression, which includes the freedom “to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds.”¹²⁶ Similarly, the UN Declaration on Human Rights Defenders, which the General Assembly adopted by consensus in 1998, sets out the rights to “know, seek, obtain, receive and hold information about all human rights and fundamental freedoms [and] freely to publish, impart or disseminate to others views, information and knowledge on all human rights and fundamental freedoms.”¹²⁷ The declaration expressly provides for the right to protest peacefully against human rights violations, including by gathering information.¹²⁸

Under the ICCPR, during a declared state of emergency that threatens the life of a nation, a state may derogate from some rights, including the right to freedom of expression.¹²⁹ There are, however, important legal limitations on this practice. According to the Human Rights Committee, “[m]easures derogating from the provisions of the Covenant must be of an exceptional and temporary nature.” Furthermore, such measures must be “limited to the extent strictly required by the exigencies of the situation.”¹³⁰ Yemen has not declared a public emergency in areas affected by the armed conflict, nor has it announced its derogation from any human rights protections.

The Yemeni Press and Publications Law of 1990 broadly prohibits publication of:

Any secret document or information which might jeopardise the supreme interests of the country or expose any of its security or defence secrets [and] [a]nything which might cause tribal, sectarian, racial, regional or ancestral discrimination, or which might spread a spirit of dissent and division among the people [and] [a]nything which leads to the spread of ideas contrary to the principles of the Yemeni Revolution prejudicial to national unity or distorting the image of the Yemeni, Arab or Islamic heritage.”¹³¹

These vague prohibitions constitute arbitrary restrictions on free speech under international law. Penalties include closing the publication, banning the journalist from practicing journalism, [and] a YAR10,000 (US$50) fine or one year in prison.¹³²

Cases of arrests

The bureau chief of an Arab television station told Human Rights Watch, “One month after the fifth war started, the Ministry of Information told us explicitly not cover the war.”¹³³ Earlier, in 2007, the government allowed journalists to go to Sa’da. One who went told Human Rights Watch that it was a tightly organized bus tour to Razih and Sa’da city, with no individual choice of locations. “We mainly saw soldiers sleeping in tents,” he recalled.¹³⁴ Hasan Zaid, the Zaidi mediator, told Human Rights Watch that two local journalists working with foreign news networks received threats from the Ministry of Information “not to cover the Sa’da war.”¹³⁵

In June 2007, the first issue of a new newspaper, Al-Shari’ (The Street), led with a report about army recruiting of volunteers. The Ministry of Defense accused the editor, managing editor and the journalist of the article of releasing military secrets, which is punishable by death. “In July 2007, armed men using a vehicle belonging to the Ministry of Defense broke into the newspaper’s offices and left a death threat,” Muhammad ‘Ayish, an editor of Al-Shari’ told Human Rights Watch.¹³⁶ The court case against the paper continues. Nabil Subai’, the recipient of the death threat, has since left his position as editor-in-chief at Al-Shari’.¹³⁷ An international humanitarian aid worker told Human Rights Watch that “a number of ministries told us that the government doesn’t want foreigners to report on what is happening there.”¹³⁸

On July 14, 2008 freelance Dutch journalist and videographer Willem Marx arrived in San’a to report on the political situation in Yemen. On July 20, he set off from San’a heading south toward Ma’rib, with Ali al-Bukhaiti and Muhammad al-Bukhaiti as his guide and interpreter. They encountered a checkpoint only half an hour outside the city, which did not let them pass. An intelligence officer and a soldier boarded their car headed back to San’a “to clear up something with your permission to travel,” Marx told Human Rights Watch. “We had our permission in order.”¹³⁹ Marx said that the officers took Ali and Muhammad al-Bukaiti to what he later learned were National Security offices on the outskirts of San’a, but that the officers never identified themselves. Officers separated Marx from the Bukhaitis, interrogated, and eventually took him in another car, supposedly ot the Ministry of Information to verify his journalistic credentials. Instead, officers took him to the airport and summarily deported him the same day. The authorities released Muhammad al-Bukhaiti in the week of September 13^th, but Ali al-Bukhaiti remains detained at an unknown location.¹⁴⁰

Yemeni human rights organizations tell a similar story of arrest and intimidation. Ali al-Dailami, director of the Yemeni Organization for the Defense of Democratic Rights and Freedoms, told Human Rights Watch that on July 15, 2008, the authorities arrested three youth—Ahmad Abdullah Kuhlani, 15, Muhammad Abd al-Rahman al-Haid, 17, and Ahmad Dhaiba, 19—who had participated two days earlier in a demonstration in front of parliament demanding to know the whereabouts of persons on the list of forcibly disappeared persons compiled by the YODDRF.¹⁴¹ Al-Dailami himself had been arrested in October 2006 at the airport on his way to Denmark on an official invitation to participate in a discussion about prisons. His captors did not tell his family where they were taking him, and told European Union officials, when they inquired, that “he is being kept on suspicion of belonging to al Qaeda.” On that occasion Dailami was released without charge two months later.¹⁴²

Khalid al-Anisi, the executive director of the National Organization for Defending Rights and Freedoms (HOOD), a Yemeni human rights organization close to the Islah Party, told Human Rights Watch that “we faced pressures to close our organization after calling for a stop to the war in 2004 and criticizing the domestic use of the army.”¹⁴³ After HOOD began monitoring arrests and took part in mediation efforts in 2005-06, al-Anisi said, a high-ranking official, “who had a part in the decision to go to war, called me and said, ‘What you are doing is more dangerous than what the Huthis are doing.’”¹⁴⁴ Muhammad Mikhlafi, of the Yemen Observatory for Human Rights (YOHR), close in outlook to the Socialist Party, said he could not make public the results of an investigation on the numbers of those killed in fighting in Harf Sufyan in June and July 2008 for fear that his investigator would be arrested.¹⁴⁵

His fear appears to have been justified. Human Rights Watch investigated 10 cases in which persons were arrested for publishing or holding information on the conflict.

The sister of one person arrested in late May 2008 told Human Rights Watch that “Mu’adh was arrested because he spoke a lot about Sa’da, was active in the field of human rights, and is a Hashemi. He said that the war is unjust and oppressive, and that the people in Sa’da needed humanitarian aid.”¹⁴⁶ She described Mu’adh’s arrest, which she witnessed: “We were driving from the university. On the way, two Hilux cars were chasing us. They blocked the road and got out. They had pistols and took him. Forty-one days after the arrest he called for the first time from prison.”¹⁴⁷

On June 30, security forces arrested Lu’ai al-Mu’ayyad (see above). Since then, no charges have been brought against him. His mother told Human Rights Watch that Lu’ai is the editor of the website yemenhurr.net (Free Yemen), where he published critical reports on the conflict in Sa’da.¹⁴⁸ Yemen blocks access to the site from inside the country.¹⁴⁹ An influential Zaidi figure with ties to both the government and the Huthis told Human Rights Watch that President Saleh informed him via telephone in late July that he would not intercede on behalf of Lu’ai, whose family had sought to obtain specialized medical care for him, “because he is part of the information cell.”¹⁵⁰ Lu’ai’s mother explained further that the authorities had in late 2006 arrested her brother, Anwar Muhsin Abu Talib, as he left the family’s house because, she said, “he had pictures of destroyed houses in Dhahyan. He remained in prison of Political Security for 11 months without charge before they released him. Now he is afraid and does not go out of the house.”¹⁵¹

The government is particularly sensitive to videos and photos of the war. Hamid, who had been arrested from the Badr Center, told Human Rights Watch about several detainees he met while in detention, including Rashid, “a prisoner who was only 13 years old. Rashid was arrested at the airport for having CDs of Huthis. He remained in detention for about seven months before being released. Family visits did not begin until one and a half months following his arrest.”¹⁵²

In the trial of persons the government accused of plotting to set of explosives and poison San’a’s water supply in 2007, the main evidence produced against some of the 15 defendants consisted of transmitting Huthi videos to the media. “The evidence contains the fact that money changed hands, that there were CDs with videos of the war, and that there was an agreement to supply medicines to Sa’da,” a lawyer for the defense told Human Rights Watch. ¹⁵³ This evidence was used to press charges of setting off explosives and attempting to poison San’a’s water supply. “When I asked the prosecution for evidence of the unsubstantiated charges,” the lawyer said, “they could not even specify when the crimes of explosions or poisoning or the conspiracy were supposed to have occurred, but wrote ‘from 2006 to the moment of arrest’ in the charge sheet.”¹⁵⁴

One of those arrested was Ibrahim Abu Talib, who was working in a computer shop. According to a lawyer familiar with the case:

Basim Humaidan, the central figure in the accusation, came to the shop and wanted to use a computer. The two had no previous relation. Basim said he wanted to burn CDs with war footage. Ibrahim told him that he does not have the right equipment, and Basim left. That was the basis of his accusation. Ibrahim’s sentence was eight and a half years in prison. Another defendant, Muna Khalid, was sentenced to six years in prison because Basim asked her for information about a journalist and she showed him the journalist’s house.¹⁵⁵

The government has also arrested persons officially appointed to mediate between the government and the Huthis when they expressed criticism of government policies. Abdullah Al Wajman told Human Rights Watch about his father, Shaikh Salih Ali Al Wajman, of the Bani Hadi tribe in Sa’da, who was arrested on February 15, 2007. He recalled that he was with his father when:

The minister of interior called him and other members of the Sa’da Committee, Ibrahim al-Mansur, Muhammad Shari’ and others, to talk about the Huthis because he was a mediator. The president appointed him a mediator three months before that war and he met Husain and Abd al-Malik al-Huthi. All were arrested for one day, because they had written a report that was unfavorable to the government. One week later, the minister called my father again to discuss Sa’da over lunch. At the ministry, people sent my father to Mujahid al-Ashmuri, the head of detention for shaikhs. After three months, they told him, “We arrested you to protect you. Because we are afraid terrorists will harm you.”¹⁵⁶

The Yemen Times on August 17, 2008 reported the Ministry of Interior released Shaikh Wajman that day as part of a prisoner exchange with the Huthis.¹⁵⁷

On July 3, 2008, agents of Political Security arrested Abdullah al-Mu’ayyad outside his house in San’a. He was part of the official fourth San’a mediation committee and had worked with the Qatari delegation. His wife told Human Rights Watch that before his arrest he had grown disillusioned with the government’s mediation efforts: “He told me he thought the [mediators] were only there to prolong the war.”¹⁵⁸