Privacy Overview
This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
5, February 2022
Push to free Anglophone journalists jailed in Cameroon intensifies 0
The Committee to Protect Journalists on Thursday, February 3, joined 26 other civil society organizations in calling on President Paul Biya to release all those arbitrarily detained in Cameroon for acts of free expression, including at least four journalists.
The open letter, published during the Africa Cup of Nations in Cameroon, notes that the continent’s premier football tournament masks the reality that over 100 people have been detained, most for more than a year, and some for over five years, for simply “peacefully exercising their human rights.”
Journalists Thomas Awah Junior, Mancho Bibixy, Tsi Conrad, and Kingsley Fomunyuy Njoka are detained on anti-state charges in Yaounde’s overcrowded Kondengui Central Prison, as documented in CPJ’s annual census of jailed journalists around the world.
The organizations also urged Biya to reform the laws currently used to criminalize protest and public assembly, including the country’s controversial anti-terror law that is used to silence critics and suppress dissent, as documented in a 2017 special report by CPJ.