(RSF/IFEX) – In a letter to Dah Ould Abdeljellil, minister of the interior, postal services and telecommunications, RSF protested the banning of the Arabic-language weekly “Al Alam”. RSF Secretary-General Robert Ménard asked the minister to “cast aside this decision,” which he considered to be “all the more worrying when one considers that the last such […]
(RSF/IFEX) – In a letter to Dah Ould Abdeljellil, minister of the interior, postal services and telecommunications, RSF protested the banning of the Arabic-language weekly “Al Alam”. RSF Secretary-General Robert Ménard asked the minister to “cast aside this decision,” which he considered to be “all the more worrying when one considers that the last such ban occured in 1997.” “By taking this measure, the authorities have gone a step further in their repression of press freedom since, until now, they contented themselves with seizing troublesome issues of newspapers,” added Ménard. Nine newspapers have been seized in Mauritania since 1 January 2000.
According to information collected by RSF, on 14 December, in accordance with Article 11 of the press law, the Ministry of the Interior ordered the seizure of the Arabic-language weekly “Al Alam”. On 16 December, the ministry banned the newspaper’s publication. The incriminating issue included an article about the 28 November arrest of three officers and a second article about the recent campaign against the arrest of political opposition figures. Mohamed Mahmoud Ould Bacar, the newspaper’s editor-in-chief, is the former editor-in-chief of the Arabic-language edition of the weekly “El Calame”, the most frequently seized newspaper in Mauritania in 1998 and 1999.
Article 11 of the Mauritanian press law provides for “the ministry, by decree, to forbid the circulation, distribution or sale of newspapersâ¦that undermine the principles of Islam or the credibility of the state, damage the general interest or disturb public order and security⦔. In all such cases, the Ministry of the Interior is not required to justify its decision.
