Ethiopia reinstates hefty fines against publishing houses

Ethiopia reinstates hefty fines against
publishing houses

10 March, 2010 | CPJ

New York, —The Ethiopian Supreme

Court reinstated fines on Monday

against four newspaper publishing

companies over their coverage of the

disputed 2005 national election. The

Committee to Protect Journalists calls

on Ethiopian authorities to end their

continuing pursuit of politically

motivated charges related to the

election.

Judge Dagne Melaku, presiding over a

panel of three-judge panel, upheld fines

initially imposed in July 2007 against the Fasil, Serkalem, Sisay,
and Zekarias publishing houses for antistate crimes related to their
newspapers’ reporting on Ethiopia’s 2005 elections, according to
local journalists.

Monday’s ruling overturned a February 2009 High Court decision
that had struck down the fines. The High Court said that a July
2007 presidential pardon, granted to numerous journalists and
political dissidents who were facing antistate charges related to the
election, also applied to the four publishing houses.

The publishing houses and their newspapers were forced to close
in 2005 and were later banned by the government. The principals
in the companies were acquitted of individual charges of antistate
activity, although they spent 17 months in pretrial detention,
according to CPJ research.

In its ruling on Monday, the Supreme Court ordered the principals
in the publishing companies to pay the fines immediately or face
the freezing of their assets, according to local journalists.
Principals in the Serkalem publishing house, which owned Asqual,
Menelik, and Satanaw newspapers, face a fine of 120,000 birrs
(US$8,800); officials of Sisay Publishing and Advertising
Enterprise, which produced Ethiop and Abay, face a fine of
100,000 birrs (US$7,400); principals in Zekarias, publisher of
Netsanet, face a fine of 60,000 birrs (US$4,400), and officials of
Fasil, publisher of Addis Zena, face a fine of 15,000 birrs
(US$1,100). By Ethiopian economic standards, the fines are
substantial.

The administration has used legal and administrative means to
harass the owners of the four publishing companies ever since they
were acquitted, according to CPJ research. In 2007, government
prosecutors asked the Supreme Court to reinstate genocide
charges against principals in the companies, but the government
eventually dropped the effort. The government later blocked two
of the publishers, award-winning journalist Serkalem Fasil and
editor Sisay Agena, from launching new publications.

“The government continues to use the courts and administrative
means to settle political scores against journalists who were
acquitted after the 2005 election,” said CPJ Africa Program
Coordinator Tom Rhodes. “We call on Prime Minister Meles
Zenawi to end his administration’s unrelenting harassment of these
journalists, which contradicts his public statements in 2007 that the
government did not harbor a ‘sense of revenge’ toward its critics
in the press.”

Courtesy