Eritrea: Sixteen years of campaigning for Dawit Isaak

By Reporters Without Borders (RSF) 

May 5, 2017

Dawit Isaak

Dawit Isaak, laureate of the UNESCO Guillermo Cano Award

At a ceremony in Jakarta on Wednesday to mark World Press Freedom Day, UNESCO awarded its Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize to Dawit Isaak, a journalist with Swedish and Eritrean dual nationality who has been detained in the most appalling conditions in Eritrea since 2001.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has campaigned incessantly for Isaak’s release for the past 16 years and is today launching a petition with the aim of sustaining this campaign.

There has been no news of Isaak for the past 12 years. He is being held incommunicado, without access to his family or lawyers, because he did his job as a reporter and covered the political debate in Eritrean society 16 years ago. Like the ten other journalists arrested in 2001, he is regarded by the government as a terrorist.

Information obtained by RSF suggests that seven of these journalists have died in detention. According to the account of a former prison guard in 2010, the last time Isaak was seen alive, the journalists are kept in inhuman conditions, handcuffed, isolated and exposed to terrible heat.

For 16 year, RSF has worked constantly for the release of all of these unjustly detained journalists and, on World Press Freedom Day today, is launching a petition to maintain the pressure.

“The situation in Eritrea is intolerable,” said Cléa Kahn-Sriber, the head of RSF’s Africa desk. “For 16 years, this country has had no free press, its citizens have lived in terror and its journalists have been unable to work freely and have even been threatened while working for the state media.

“The situation is more critical than ever but the European Union is taking a conciliatory line with President Issayas Afeworki’s regime, above all out of concern about the flood of Eritrean refugees fleeing the terrible persecution and arriving on Europe’s shores. RSF and other NGOs have been campaigning for years but nothing will change without a clear commitment from EU member states, the UN and the African Union.”

Action instead of words?

Together with his family, RSF has been battling to draw attention to Isaak’s fate and obtain his release for 16 years. After an initial petition in 2002, many press communiqués and several appeals to the European Parliament, RSF sent an appeal to Eritrea’s constitutional court in 2011, affirming the illegality of Isaak’s detention, but never received a response.

In 2012, RSF referred the case to the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, which asked Eritrea to free the journalists or guarantee them due process. Eritrea has never responded to this request either. RSF will raise the question at the Commission’s next session on 8 May in Niamey, Niger.

During Eritrea’s Universal Periodic Review by the UN Human Rights Council, member states have made recommendations on the lack of media freedom, the complete control of state journalists and the inhuman treatment of imprisoned journalists in complete violation of all the rules of international law. But the Eritrean government has systematically ignored these recommendations.

In 2015, RSF referred Isaak’s case to the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances.

A UN special report on the human rights situation in Eritrea, to which RSF contributed, concluded in June 2016 that crimes against humanity were taking place in Eritrea and asked the International Criminal Court to take up the case. No action has so far been taken.

There have been other initiatives. In Sweden, RSF filed complaints against Eritrean government officials on Isaak’s behalf but the prosecutor refused to pursue the case. In June 2016, RSF wrote to President Afeworki asking to meet with Isaak in prison and thereby obtain proof that he is still alive. Afeworki personally acknowledged receipt of the letter but never granted the request.

There are no longer any independent media outlets in Eritrea, which is ranked 179th out of 180 countries in RSF’s 2017 World Press Freedom Index. Only the state radio stations, the government newspaper and state-owned Eri TV can report what is going on inside Eritrea.

Several foreign media outlets were allowed into Eritrea last year for a guided tour that was always the same. They were closely escorted and were unable to talk freely with members of the public.             

Source        -https://rsf.org/en

March 30, 2017
Jailed Eritrean journalist awarded UNESCO press freedom prize
RSF_en
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) hails UNESCO’s decision, announced today, to award its Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize to Dawit Isaak, a journalist with Swedish and Eritrean dual nationality who has been imprisoned in Eritrea for 15 years without every talking to a lawyer or seeing a judge.
The prize will be formally awarded at a ceremony on 3 May, World Press Freedom Day.
“The decision to award Dawit Isaak this year’s prize is an encouraging signal,” said Cléa Kahn-Sriber, the head of RSF’s Africa desk. “It sends a strong message of denunciation of regimes that obliterate the media and journalism because they communicate democratic values. We reiterate our call to the Eritrean government to free all the journalists it has arbitrarily imprisoned for so many years.”
Isaak found a refuge in Sweden in 1987. In 1993, two years after Eritrea finally obtained its independence from Ethiopia, he returned to the country of his birth to open Eritrea’s first independent newspaper, Setit, in the capital, Asmara.
In 2001, his newspaper published an open letter calling for elections and the implementation of the promised constitution. The ensuing crackdown was terrible. Isaak and ten other journalists were arrested in September of that year and have remained in prison ever since.
RSF has received information that seven of these eleven journalists have died in detention. The fate of Isaak and the other three – Emanuel Asrat, Temesgen Gebreyesus and Seyoum Tsehaye – is unclear.
Tsehaye’s two daughters, who live in France, have had no news of him since his arrest. When, aged 12 and 14, they tried to see the Eritrean ambassador in Paris, he called the police in order to have them removed from the embassy. In June 2015. RSF filed a complaint against persons unknown on their behalf with the French judicial authorities but it was deemed inadmissible.
“Joshua” was the most prominent Eritrean journalist. He is believed to have died years back in prison.     
International advocacy for Isaak
Isaak’s younger brother, Essayas Isaak, and three lawyers backed by RSF wrote to the Eritrean supreme court in Asmara in 2011 seeking a writ of habeas corpus for Isaak. They requested information about the place where he was being held and his conditions of imprisonment. The supreme court never responded, claiming it did not receive the letter.
In the absence of any response from the Eritrean supreme court, the lawyers turned to the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR) in 2013, when Isaak was 48 and had just completed his 12th year in prison. In Communication 428/12 of February 2016, the ACHPR called on Eritrea to set up a mechanism for effectively locating missing persons and for passing the information to their families.
The ACHPR also stressed the importance of taking immediate measures to allow independent media to operate, to bring relevant laws into line with international standards and to protect journalists from arrest and arbitrary treatment. Eritrea has still not complied with these obligations.
RSF also made a written submission to the United Nations Human Rights Council in 2015 about Isaak’s fate.
According to RSF’s tally, at least 15 journalists are currently detained in Eritrea, which means that Isaias Afewerki’s dictatorship is Africa’s biggest prison for media personnel.
Thousands of Eritreans, including dozens of journalists, have had no choice but to flee the country to escape the indiscriminate repression. RSF tries to follow as many of the cases of Eritrean exile journalists as possible. RSF also supports Radio Erena, an independent Eritrean radio station based in Paris that broadcasts to Eritreans in Eritrea and the diaspora.
Eritrea is ranked last, 180th out of 180 countries, in RSF’s 2016 World Press Freedom Index.
The UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize was created in 1997 by UNESCO’s executive council to honour a person, organization or institution that has made an outstanding contribution to the defence and/or promotion of media freedom anywhere in the world, especially when this has been achieved in the face of danger.