Still held illegally, website editor is being tried again on same charge

Reporters Without Borders reiterates its call for the immediate release of the Hanevy Ould Dehah, the editor of the website Taqadoumy, and the withdrawal of all the charges against him. Dehah is being retried on the same charges on which he has already served a six-month sentence. The trial opened on 1 February and the next hearing is scheduled for tomorrow. The court should be acting as if last summer’s trial never took place. It has ordered the prosecutor’s office to correct procedural errors denounced by Dehah’s lawyer, but it has not ruled on his arbitrary detention or, as yet, the substance of the case. “The authorities need to realise that they are being monitored closely both within Mauritania and abroad,” Reporters Without Borders said. “They must demonstrate the independence of their judicial system by clearing Dehah and restoring him to the freedom that is rightly his.” Dehah should have been released on 24 December on completing a six-month sentence on a trumped-up charge of “offending public decency” (http://www.rsf.org/Website-editor-gets-six-months-in.html) but the authorities, who are clearly bent on persecuting him, have continued to hold him in a manifestly illegal manner ever since (http://www.rsf.org/Website-editor-still-held-three.html). Reporters Without Borders interviews in French with Hacen Ould Lebatt, the editor of the French section of the Taqadoumy website, on 8 January and Brahim Ould Ebety, Dehah’s lawyer, on 13 January can be viewed at the foot of the 14 January release (http://www.rsf.org/Website-editor-still-held-three.html).
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Updated on 20.01.2016