(RSF/IFEX) – Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said it feared that court summonses issued to independent journalists Oscar Espinosa Chepe and Jorge Olivera Castillo mean they will be sent back to jail. The two men, who were imprisoned in the March 2003 crackdown, were released on health grounds at the end of 2004. They then both […]
(RSF/IFEX) – Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said it feared that court summonses issued to independent journalists Oscar Espinosa Chepe and Jorge Olivera Castillo mean they will be sent back to jail.
The two men, who were imprisoned in the March 2003 crackdown, were released on health grounds at the end of 2004. They then both sought and were refused permission to leave Cuba.
“These ill-timed court summonses look like a judicial farce”, said RSF. “What is the point of trying to get independent journalists to give up their work, knowing full well that they will never do so? If the Cuban authorities are so determined to silence Oscar Espinosa Chepe and Jorge Olivera Castillo, why don’t they grant their requests to leave the country? The repression of dissident voices is, in any event, doomed to failure”, the organization added.
Espinosa Chepe, who was sentenced in April 2003 to 20 years in prison, was released for health reasons on 29 November 2004. “I am in danger of having this conditional release revoked which would mean going back to prison”, he told RSF.
“A new crackdown is sweeping the country and the independent press is first in line”, he said on the eve of his appearance on 28 February 2006 before the Playa municipal court in Havana.
Olivera Castillo, who was sentenced to 18 years in prison in 2003 and released on 6 December 2004, is due to appear on 1 March 2006 before Old Havana municipal court, which previously summoned him on 21 February. At that hearing, the judges informed him that he was banned from leaving the city and ordered him to work for a state organisation.
They told him he would be immediately returned to prison if he did not abide by these conditions. The 1 March hearing could well mean the confirmation of this measure, since, as he told RSF upon leaving the court on 21 February, he has no intention of giving up his journalistic work.
Elsewhere, on 15 February, the East Havana municipal court sentenced Reinaldo Cosado Alén, of the independent Lux Info Press news agency, to “correctional work without imprisonment” because of a fine equivalent to 1,000 euros that had supposedly gone unpaid for ten years.
