Sudan

“We should not praise the government for releasing people it had no right to imprison in the first place. Releasing the detainees three days before an election is part of President Bashir’s effort to legitimize a tainted electoral process,” said Vukasin Petrovic, regional director for Africa at Freedom House.

The seizures not only constitute a grave violation of media pluralism but also inflict major financial losses on publications that are already fighting for economic survival.

Madeeha Abdella, editor-in-chief of the Sudan Communist Party newspaper Al-Midan, is facing a possible death sentence on charges of crimes against the state, prompted by an interview with a military commander of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North.

“Freedom House condemns the arrest of Dr. Medani for his work protecting and promoting human rights in Sudan,” said Jenai Cox, program manager for Africa at Freedom House.

Journalist al-Nour Ahmed al-Nour’s wife said that security forces told her his arrest stemmed from a complaint by an official in Sudan’s Ministry of Water Resources and Electricity, who accused the journalist of fabricating information for a story.

Al-Nur is an unusually outspoken journalist in a country where censorship and self-censorship reign. In past interviews for the Doha Centre for Media Freedom and the newspaper The Niles, he accused the Sudanese authorities of cracking down on the national media.

On October 5 and 6, 2014, government security forces forcibly evicted about 70 female students from the Zahra dormitory complex in Khartoum, beating and arresting many students.

Nuba Reports, a news website specializing in covering the states of South Kordofan, Blue Nile and Darfur, is concerned for the safety of its local correspondents after it was the target of a Distributed Denial of Service attack.

Abdelrahman Alaagib and Eisa Aizain have been held in an unknown location since 22 September, when the National Intelligence and Security Services arrested them in Khartoum for unknown reasons.

The United Nations Human Rights Council should call on Sudan to account immediately for the death or injury of hundreds of largely peaceful protesters at the hands of government security forces in September 2013.

Against a general background of restrictions on free speech and political organising, the Sudanese authorities have clamped down in recent months on political opposition figures for criticizing Sudan’s abuses in conflict zones.

Sudanese authorities sent a letter to the Salema Center for Women’s Research and Studies on 24 June 2014, informing the organisation that it would be shut down. The group has deemed this action to be illegal.

The head of the Sudanese Congress Party, Ibrahim Al-Sheikh, has been charged with disseminating false news, undermining the constitutional order, calling for an armed opposition, tarnishing the regime’s image, and disturbing the public order.

Sudanese information minister Ahmed Bilal Osmanan announced on 21 May that a “special commission” would soon be created to examine all proposed articles about corruption to decide whether or not they can be published.

The African Commission should condemn the Angolan government’s failure to address restrictions on the media and peaceful assembly. It should also establish and send a fact-finding mission to Sudan to investigate the killings and injury of dozens of protesters last September.

“Sudan needs to address evidence that its forces killed scores of people during protests, and arbitrarily arrested and tortured detainees,” said Daniel Bekele, Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “Instead of investigating these crimes, it’s using brutality and violence to silence perceived opponents.”