The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) and the Yemeni Journalists Syndicate (YJS) are launching an emergency call to members and the global journalism community to join the campaign to put pressure on the Houthi authorities to release our colleagues and save their lives.
Abdul Khaleq Amran, Tawfiq Al-Mansouri, Harith Hamid, and Akram Al-Walidi -read their profiles here- were arrested together with five other journalists on 9 June 2015 at the Hotel Dream Castle in Sana’a. Their arrest was motivated by their reporting on human rights violations committed by Houthi forces, who charged them with “espionage for foreign states and spreading fake news”.
Since their arrest, they have been subjected to a series of crimes, including forced disappearance, physical and psychological torture, denial of the right to be visited and the right to have access to medical care. These actions break all international conventions and norms on the treatment of prisoners.
Now they are on death row and the IFJ and the YJS are seeking to increase pressure on the Ansar Allah to release them and push key actors across the international community to put the lives of our colleagues high on their agenda.
The IFJ campaign will:
- Launch an open letter to the United Nation’s envoy to Yemen to treat this case as an urgent matter – click here to sign the open letter
- Put pressure on relevant government and intergovernmental bodies to demand that this issue has a priority in his agenda
- Secure the participation of YJS at the upcoming meeting of the Human Rights Council to raise this issue in particular and the critical situation of Yemeni media workers in general
IFJ General Secretary, Anthony Bellanger, said: "We need to hear the UN, the EU and governments across the world stand up for journalists and unequivocally tell Ansar Allah and the de facto government in Sanaa that torturing and executing journalists is a war crime and that the world should not tolerate war criminals. But that's not all. We must send a message to our friends Abdul, Tawfiq, Harith and Akram and their families that they are not alone and the whole global journalism community and freedom of expression and human rights activists will relentlessly work for their freedom".