Euromed meeting: EU asked to press for release of Ibrahim Hamidi

Reporters Without Borders today urged the EU foreign ministers to raise the lack of press freedom in Syria with their Syrian counterpart, probably foreign minister Farouk al-Chareh, during the meeting of Euro-Mediterranean foreign ministers in Crete on 26-27 May. The organisation is above all calling for the immediate release of Ibrahim Hamidi, Damascus bureau chief of the London-based pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat, who has been detained for more than five months. Aged 33 and a Syrian national, Hamidi was arrested on 23 December 2002 and is currently being held in Adra prison in Damascus. The government news agency SANA said on 27 December that he would be tried for "putting out inaccurate news," which is punishable by between one and three years in prison. At the end of February, his lawyer, Moustapha Amin, called for the prosecution to be dropped in the absence of significant charges against him. Hamidi reported in a 20 December article on preparations by the Syrian authorities and the United Nations in the northeastern part of the country to receive a million Iraqi refugees if there was a war against Iraq. The newspaper printed a statement on 24 December by a spokesman for the prime minister denying that Syria or the Red Crescent were setting up hospitals and camps along the border with Iraq. Syria has confirmed that it will attend the 26-27 May meeting in Heraklion, Crete, which will bring together the EU's foreign ministers with their counterparts from the eastern and southern shores of the Mediterranean.