New York, January 4, 2006—The Committee to Protect Journalists is concerned by an arson attack on private Cameroonian radio station Freedom FM. Fire broke out in the building housing the station on Tuesday evening, according to Freedom FM’s founder Pius Njawe, who received CPJ’s International Press Freedom Award in 1991. He told CPJ that police…
New York, November 14, 2005—Australian freelance journalist Andrew Mueller was released on Sunday after two days in police custody in southwestern Cameroon. Mueller was arrested in the town of Kumbo on Friday after interviewing members of the Southern Cameroon National Council (SCNC), which claims a separate state for Anglophone Cameroonians. He was later transferred to…
New York, November 11, 2005—Police in southwestern Cameroon detained an Australian freelance journalist today as he was researching secessionist movements in the region. Cameroonian Communications Minister Pierre Moukoko Mbonjo told the Committee to Protect Journalists that authorities are investigating Andrew Mueller’s activities. Speaking by phone from detention, Mueller told CPJ that he was traveling to…
New York, August 19, 2005—The Committee to Protect Journalists is troubled by the growing legal harassment of the independent weekly L’Oeil du Sahel by Cameroon’s security forces. Army officers have brought at least twelve court cases against the newspaper since the beginning of the year, threatening its financial survival, director Guibaï Gatama said. L’Oeil du…
AUGUST 17, 2005 Posted: September 15, 2005 Guibaï Gatama, L’Oeil du Sahel LEGAL ACTION A court in Maroua, the capital of Cameroon’s Far North Province, sentenced L’Oeil du Sahel publication director Guibaï Gatama in absentia to pay damages of 5 million CFA francs (U.S. $ 9,275) to the head of military security in the province…
New York, July 14, 2005—Government officials unsealed the studios of Freedom FM on Tuesday, more than two years after the Communications Ministry shuttered the private radio station just as it was about to broadcast for the first time. Based in the southwestern port city of Douala, the station was founded by Pius Njawé, a veteran…
New York, July 11, 2005—The editor-in-chief of the private weekly Le Front has been imprisoned since July 6. CPJ sources said a prosecutor ordered Joseph Bessala Ahanda jailed indefinitely, pending the results of a judicial investigation into defamation allegations against him. The case stems from a series of reports in Le Front alleging that the…
Restrictive regimes around the world came out ahead. Many were already taking a cue from a U.S. case involving the leak of a CIA officer’s name when the Supreme Court announced this week that it would not hear an appeal by two journalists. The reporters, Matthew Cooper of Time magazine and Judith Miller of The New York Times, face 18-month jail terms for not revealing their confidential sources.
Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists is deeply troubled by the recent jail sentence given in absentia to two journalists who reported on alleged corruption in the gendarmerie. On April 20, a court in Maroua, the capital of Cameroon’s Far North Province, sentenced Guibaï Gatama, publication director of the independent weekly L’Oeil du Sahel, and Abdoulaye Oumaté, a journalist for the paper, to five months in prison and fined them 5 million CFA francs (approximately U.S. $9,782) in a criminal defamation case.