The harassment continues

The publisher of the Algerian daily Liberté, Farid Alilat, was arrested at his newspaper offices and taken before the court in Algiers where he was questioned for five hours about a column entitled, "La fessée" (The Spanking). Reporters Without Borders (Reporters Sans Frontières) condemned the 7 October episode as the latest in a run of relentless harassment of the independent press. The press freedom organisation warned the authorities not to damage freedom of expression on the eve of the presidential election. "These arrests bring the government into disrepute", said Robert Ménard, secretary-general of Reporters Without Borders. The offending column, published on 21 August, was bylined Hakim Laâlam of the daily Le Soir d'Algérie, at the time under a suspension for failing to pay its debts to the state printing works. Liberté had published the column in its own pages in a gesture of solidarity. Journalists working in the private press took a collective decision at the beginning of September to refuse to respond when summoned by the judicial police. They decided they would only answer for what they had written before the courts. Editor in chief of Liberté, Said Chekri said the summonses arrived so thick and fast that it was hard to keep track of them, around 30 in an average month. There had been the same rigmarole for more than a month. After three summonses there would be an arrest, the journalist taken before the chief prosecutor and the examining magistrate, followed, until now, by a conditional release. Sometimes common law cases going back several years are reopened but generally journalists are arrested for "insulting the head of state" (under Article 144a of the Criminal Code). A new element has been the fact that journalists have been arrested not in the street but at their newspaper offices.