Lawyer's prison sentence confirmed at new sham hearing

Reporters Without Borders today denounced as "disgraceful" the upholding of a three-and-a-half-year prison sentence imposed on lawyer Mohammed Abbou for posting allegedly inaccurate news online and jostling a female colleague nearly three years ago. Neither he nor his lawyers were allowed to contest the charges at 10 June appeals court hearing. "The Tunisian authorities have not bothered to pretend this disgraceful verdict was the result of a fair trial," the worldwide press freedom organisation said. "We shall be interested to see how the European Union and the United States, whose diplomats were ordered out of the courtroom, will react. "The moment has come to strongly denounce President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali's repressive policies, with barely five months to go to the holding in Tunisia of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) dealing with the Internet." French lawyer Guillaume Prigent, who was at the appeal hearing on behalf of Reporters Without Borders, said afterwards the basic rights of the defence had not been respected. The hearing lasted only a few minutes and the judge began by sending the diplomats out because he said they were "making too much noise." He then expelled the media and others, including the defendant's wife, leaving only the defence lawyers and legal observers from foreign NGOs in the courtroom. Representatives of the US, France, the EU, Finland and Spain tried to attend the hearing. As well as Prigent, lawyers from the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), Amnesty International and Lawyers Without Borders were present. Abou, who has been held since 1 March, had been sentenced on 29 April, at a trial that Reporters Without Borders denounced as a sham, to two years for jostling a colleague at a conference in 2002, though no evidence was presented apart from an unsigned medical certificate. He was also given an 18-month sentence for posting on the Tunisnews website in August last year an article that compared the torture of political prisoners in Tunisia to that perpetrated by US soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. But many observers reckoned he was in fact being punished for another article, posted a few days before he was arrested, that criticised an invitation to Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon to attend the UN-sponsored WSIS meeting in November and sarcastically denounced corruption in President Ben Ali's family.