Amnesty International urges Sudan to end press restrictions ahead of referendum

September 23, 2010 (WASHINGTON) – The Sudanese authorities must halt the harassment and intimidation of journalists in the run up to the referendum on southern independence in January 2011, Amnesty International said in a press release today.

“No credible poll can be conducted in an environment where freedom of speech is being so openly violated,” said Rania Rajji, Amnesty International’s Sudan researcher.

“The governments of north and south Sudan must ensure the vote is held in an atmosphere where all Sudanese can freely express their views and halt any further restrictions to freedom of expression”.

Reporters Without Borders ranked Sudan as number 148 in its 2009’s World Press Freedom Index.

The south is expected to vote to secede from the Islamic north against which it has fought an off-on civil war since 1955 over ethnicity, ideology and oil.

Southerners were promised a vote on whether to secede in the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement which ended Africa’s longest civil war. The conflict claimed 2 million lives, mostly through hunger and disease, and destabilized much of east Africa.

This month, Mohamed Chande Othman, an independent expert on human rights in Sudan urged Khartoum to lift restrictions on the press in the run-up to the referendum.

“These developments represent a serious setback and are of particular concern as the country prepares for the referendum,” Othman said in a speech to the U.N. Human Rights Council.

“It is essential that authorities uphold human rights principles as a way of ensuring a peaceful and credible referendum,” he said.

Sudan stepped up censorship in February 2008 after some journalists excoriated the government for backing a failed push by Chadian rebels to storm the capital Ndjamena and overthrow President Idriss Deby.

The practice was later suspended as the country was approaching national elections in April 2010 and after chief editors of newspapers were forced to sign a journalistic code of honour obliging them to refrain from the publication of any content that crosses red-lines. These red-lines, in the words of Sudanese President Omer Hassan Al-Bashir, are anything “destructive to the nation, sovereignty, security, values and morality.”

But censorship made a comeback last June, less than two months after the country held national elections which were supposed to herald an era of democratic transformation.

Last July, the National Intelligence and Security Services (NISS) closed down Al-Intibaha newspaper which a Northern owned newspaper that openly supports South secession and a fervent critic of the South Sudan government.

In the same month three journalists working at a paper belonging to the Popular Congress Party (PCP) of Hassan Al-Turabi were sentenced to jail on charges of attempting to destabilise the constitutional system.

They are specifically accused of having published “false” reports on an alleged factory in Sudan that makes weapons for Iran. They also wrote articles suggesting that Bashir, who was re-elected in April polls, did not enjoy widespread support in Sudan.

(ST)