In 2001, the Eritrean government shut down the entire independent press. The Swedish-Eritrean journalist Dawit Isaak, a prolific writer and courageous journalist with Setit, Eritrea’s first independent newspaper, was arbitrarily detained, held incommunicado, and denied access to family, consular assistance, and the right to counsel—effectively, an enforced disappearance. The “crime”? Setit had published an open letter calling for democratic reform signed by fifteen members of Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki’s government.
Isaak and his colleagues are the longest detained journalists in the world today. Eleven of the open letter’s signatories were detained along with them, and some have already died in prison. No independent media has operated in Eritrea since Isaak’s arrest. The World Press Freedom Index has ranked Eritrea last out of 180 countries for more than a decade, behind China and North Korea. In 2019, the Committee to Protect Journalists designated Eritrea the most censored country in the world.
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While we have reason to hope that Isaak is still alive, his present location and condition are unknown. In 2008, there were unconfirmed reports that he was transferred to a maximum security prison where he became seriously ill and was admitted to a hospital in the capital Asmara. Isaak is likely being held in the Eiraeiro prison camp, one of a network of secret prisons where thousands of political prisoners are held in what Amnesty International calls “unimaginably atrocious conditions.”
Isaak’s case offers a looking glass into President Afwerki’s domestic repression, and his government’s systematic and widespread gross human rights violations of its own Constitution. It is also a case study of the global assault on media freedom by authoritarian regimes that have enjoyed an impunity that has intensified under the cover of the
Source : time
