Gathered by Reporters Without Borders (RSF), sixteen press owners from various countries, including Nobel Peace Prize winner Dmitri Mouratov, are calling on Tuesday 10 January for the release of their Algerian colleague Ihsane El-Kadi, detained since the end of December, and for remove the obstacles “inadmissible” targeting its media.
“We consider that the imprisonment of Ihsane El-Kadi, director of Radio M and Maghreb Emergent, on manifestly aberrant grounds, constitutes an intolerable attack on press freedom in Algeria”write the signatories.
Besides the editor of the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, Dmitry Muratov (Russia), the list of signatories includes the director of the daily The world, Jérôme Fenoglio, (France), the executive director of the webzine Inkyfada, Malek Khadhraoui (Tunisia) or the deputy editor of the daily Gazeta Wyborcza, Jaroslaw Kurski (Poland).
Calling Algeria “to show its attachment to the law and to democratic values”they ask the “authorities” of the country of “release without delay” their colleague,“drop all charges” targeting him and returning to his media – whose offices were sealed and the equipment seized – “their working tools”.
A “political motivation”
Mr. El-Kadi was placed in pre-trial detention on December 29 as part of an investigation for illegal fundraising and alleged attack on state security, after four days in police custody. He is suspected “to have received sums of money and privileges from persons and organizations in the country and abroad in order to engage in activities likely to undermine the security of the State and its stability »had then indicated the Court of Algiers.
According to RSF, his arrest, “come just days after the publication of articles critical of the authorities”to one “political motivation”. Tuesday’s call comes a week before “the examination of the appeal brought against the order of his detention, on January 18”.
Last week, the NGO denounced to the UN a “legal harassment”illustrated in particular by the previous conviction of Mr. El-Kadi “to six months in prison in June 2022”. Algeria ranks 134e place out of 180 countries in the world press freedom ranking established by RSF in 2022.