Challenges to Freedom of the Press in ECOWAS countries

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A number of ECOWAS countries have been in the news in recent months for attacks on press freedom. The map above shows the Reporters Without Borders 2021 rankings for West Africa. The best ranked countries in the region are Ghana (30th) and Burkina Faso (37th). The worst are Nigeria, Benin, and Guinea (109th). Benin had the most dramatic fall, from ranking 91st in 2019 to 114th in 2021. Mali, on the other hand, rose from 112th in 2019 to 99th.

Some examples:

In June President Buhari of Nigeria banned Twitter, and the parliament attempted to pass a law that "would allow the government to jail journalists, fine newspapers up to 10m naira ($20,000) or close them for up to a year if they publish “fake” news. ... the latest efforts to push through the law come just weeks after Nigeria’s government banned people from using Twitter, and amid increasingly heavy-handed restrictions on broadcast media. Last year Nigeria fell five places (to 120th out of 180) in a ranking of press freedom compiled by Reporters Without Borders, a watchdog."

Benin's Supreme Court concluded in July that Benin’s laws were correctly applied when Beninese journalist Ignace Sossou was sentenced to an 18-month prison sentence in 2019 for accurately tweeting comments made by the Cotonou public prosecutor. Sossou was convicted of “harassment by means of electronic communication” under Benin's 2018 digital media law that the U.N. Working Group of Arbitrary Detention criticized as “lacking clarity” and able to “be used to punish the free exercise of human rights.” Other journalists have also been arbitrarily detained under the digital media law. In July 2020, the Haute Autorité de l’audiovisuel et de la communication (HAAC) in Benin announced the closure of all online media that don’t have HAAC’s authorization. 

In February, Togo's HAAC suspended the privately owned L’Alternative for four months due to a complaint by Togo’s Minister of Urbanism, Housing, and Land Reform for a story that he alleged contained “false information, offense, and defamation.” In a letter to the HAAC president, one of its members wrote that, “in taking this [suspension] decision, we simply did the will of (the minister)." In an unrelated case in January, the HAAC withdrew the operating permits for the newspaper, L’Indépendant Express. 

In Guinea, despite prison sentences for press offenses being abolished in 2010, a journalist for RTG was arrested in February for insulting the president, who was elected to a disputed third term in 2020. After three months in jail, he was released in May. 




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