Concern about increase in violence against journalists

Yemenis have generally enjoyed more freedom of expression since Abd Rab Mansour Hadi succeeded Ali Abdullah Saleh as president in February 2012, but this progress has been accompanied by an increase in threats and violence against media personnel by the opposition and various armed groups. “We condemn the escalation in attacks on journalists, who have a right to practice their profession without others putting their lives in danger, and we call on the authorities to respond by conducting independent investigations into all these attacks,” Reporters Without Borders said. In one of the latest incidents, four employees of Dubai-based Al-Arabiya TV – news director Jamal Noman and cameramen Fouad Al-Khadar, Abdallah Asoufi and Fath Al-Jabari ¬– were beaten, insulted and threatened by participants in a march in Sanaa on 18 September calling for the prosecution of those responsible for the 2011 “Kentucky massacre.” Two apparent supporters of independence for southern Yemen attacked Nabeel Ahmad, a cameraman with Suhail TV, a Yemeni station, and tried to grab his camera while he was filming a documentary in Crater, a district in the southern city of Aden, on 9 September. The staff of the newspaper Al-Sharea reported on 9 September that they had received telephone calls warning them to “stop publishing any information about Al-Qaeda and Saudi Arabia” if they did not want the newspaper’s premises burned down with all of its employees inside. The Yemeni government’s failure to guarantee freedom of information includes an inability to stop displays of mistrust of hostility towards journalists from within the ranks of the police and security forces. National Security Agency personnel detained Adel Abdu Al-Mughni, editor in chief of the online news portal Al-Wahdawi.net, for several hours at Sanaa international airport on 14 September as he returned from attending a seminar for journalists in Morocco. Journalist and human rights activist Mohammed Al-Abbsi was threatened by the National Security Agency after he published a letter from the head of the agency to the oil minister on 2 September calling for the dismissal of union members who were pressing for a strike in the oil industry. Abbsi and Al-Neda’a newspaper editor Sami Ghalib were unable to accept invitations to address the Swedish parliament and the University of Copenhagen about human rights violations and threats to journalists in Yemen. As Sweden and Denmark have no consulate in Yemen, the two journalists followed standard procedure and applied to the French embassy for European “Schengen area” visas, but the French embassy refused to issue them. Meanwhile, New York-based Human Rights Watch issued a report on Yemen on 19 September entitled “‘A Life-Threatening Career’: Attacks on Journalists under Yemen's New Government.” In a press statement announcing the report’s release, HRW said: “A surge of attacks on journalists since a new president took office in Yemen may overwhelm the recent progress toward freedom of expression.”