SENEGAL: Editor El Malick Seck released

8 May 2009

Update #1 to RAN 51/08

The Writers in Prison Committee of International PEN (WiPC) welcomes the news that 24 Heures Chrono editor El Malick Seck, who was serving a three-and-a-half year sentence for "offending the head of state" and defaming a government minister, has been released from prison. Seck was reportedly freed on 24 April 2009 following a presidential pardon. The WiPC commends the release but reminds President Wade that Seck has apparently spent eight months in jail for exercising his right to freedom of expression. It urges the President to review Senegal's defamation laws and fulfil his promise to decriminalise press offences.

El Malick Seck, editor of the Dakar daily 24 Heures Chrono, was arrested on 28 August 2008 and sentenced to three years in prison on charges of offending the head of state, publishing false news and threatening public order on 12 September 2008. The charges reportedly stemmed from an editorial that alleged that President Wade and his son Karim, a special adviser, were involved in laundering money stolen from a bank in the Ivory Coast. Seck's arrest followed an attack on the premises of 24 Heures Chrono and another newspaper in mid-August 2008, days after the then Transport Minister Farba Senghor threatened retaliation against the papers for publishing critical stories. Government officials were allegedly involved in the attack.

On 23 December 2008, Seck was sentenced to a further six months in prison for defaming Interior Minister Sheikh Tidiane Sy and ordered to pay approx. US$66,600 in damages. In yet another defamation case against Seck another 24 Heures Chrono journalist by the Ministry of Culture's secretary general, Pape Massène Sène, the two men were each sentenced to a one-year suspended prison term and a FCFA 250,000 fine.

Seck's appeal against the original convection was rejected on 23 February 2009 and the sentence upheld. However, he was reportedly released on 24 April following a presidential pardon. He had spent a total of eight months in prison.

Background

Senegal is one of Africa's worst offenders in terms of criminal defamation prosecutions, with some 20 such cases brought against journalists every year. Courts frequently hand down disproportionate rulings, often consisting of both custodial sentences and heavy fines, although in the recent past journalists have rarely gone to prison.

President Abdoulaye Wade pledged to repeal criminal penalties for press offences, including defamation in 2004, but there has been no progress since. Indeed, the use of criminal defamation laws against journalists, including those providing for ‘insulting the President', appears to have increased in recent years.

For more information, see the WiPC's report Free Expression, Corruption and Criminal Defamation in Africa published in January 2008, available in English or French.