“What Is Free Press?” Ask Those You Disappeared

Eritrea is now a member of Human Rights Council (HRC) and submitted its report as part of the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) cycle. It was challenged on its human rights record by many countries: freedom of expression, worship, assembly, lack of constitution, lack of independent jurors, indefinite national service, etc.

This video (Chapter 1) focuses on freedom of speech and the government’s hilarious defense that it exists is to refer to the presence of exiled Eritrean media like awate.com, asmarino.com, assenna.com, Erena radio, media outlets it spends a great of time demonizing and a great deal of resource trying to block.

The spokesperson claims that that there are no websites blocked when wikileaks dumped all Riyadh diplomatic email and disclosed that the Eritrean government requested that a few Arabic language websites be blocked.

The spokesperson for Eritrean government makes only a passing mention to the extremely low bandwidth in Eritrea, without bothering to disclose that this was done deliberately to choke information. He also talks about the proliferation of internet cafes in Eritrea, when everybody knows that internet cafes are extremely limited requiring waiting sometimes for hours. Finally, he doesn’t mention the fact that there is no mobile data in Eritrea.

Finally, a reminder of what another spokesperson for the Eritrean government said when he was asked about free press: “what is free press?” This attempt to mystify is despite the fact that there is a conventional understanding of what free press is, something that the Government of Eritrea has signed off on on multiple UN and African conventions. Free press is that whose disappearance you enforceFree press is the opposite of what you do: creating a predatory state which has “ears” (spies) everywhere, floating about collecting information to ensnare people who express a dissenting view.

Subsequent chapters will deal with National Service, the Constitution and Eritrea’s refusal to allow rapporteurs although it is required to, specially as a member of the HRC.