Authorities crack down on newspaper editors

Reporters Without Borders today denounced the legal harassment of two Moroccan weekly newspaper editors - Mohammed el-Hourd (Asharq) and Mustapha Kechnini (Al Hayat al-Maghribia) (Moroccan Life) - who have been convicted under the country's new press law but are being tried again for the same offences by a court in the northeastern city of Oujda, where they are published. They have been summoned to appear on 19 October. "King Mohammed VI has assured his people and French President Jacques Chirac that democracy will be encouraged, but the country's courts are abusing legal principals such as not being tried twice for the same offence," said the organisation's secretary-general, Robert Ménard. "The king must remember that press freedom is an absolute condition for the democracy he is talking about so much." El-Hourd was sentenced to three years in prison on 4 August by a Rabat court for publishing an article on 5 June by Islamic fundamentalist Zakkaria Boughrara, even though it did not advocate hatred or call for violence. He is being held at Salé prison, where journalist Ali Lmrabet is serving a three-year sentence for "insulting the king" in articles and cartoons. Kechnini was sentenced, also on 4 August, to a year in jail and fined 500 dirhams (500 euros) for publishing the same Boughrara article in his paper's 5 May issue. After a month in prison, he was provisionally freed to await his appeal against the sentence before a Rabat court. Kechnini, who has been tried five times already this year, has also been summoned by the Oujda court for a 20 May article in his paper simply calling Hassan II (Mohammed VI's father) "the late king" instead of using the standard term "the late king, whom God protect with his divine mercy." The prosecutor said this was disrespectful to the monarch.