Foreign Journalists Under Fire

A kangaroo court in Egypt recently sentenced three journalists from the Al Jazeera English network to three years in prison for committing journalism.

On Tuesday, in Azerbaijan, an award-winning investigative journalist was not allowed to finish her closing statement before a judge sentenced her to more than seven years in prison.

Authorities in Turkey, meanwhile, took three journalists from VICE news, a media company, into custody last weekend, claiming, spuriously, that the journalists were aiding the Islamic State. Later in the week, police officers raided the office of another company that owns news outlets.

These efforts by governments to silence journalists are having a profoundly corrosive effect on journalism at a time when strong news gathering is sorely needed.

The conviction in Cairo of Mohamed Fahmy, Baher Mohamed and Peter Greste, who was deported earlier this year, provided the coda to a long-running travesty of justice. The prosecution was never about the conduct of the journalists. They were pawns in a fight between Egypt and Qatar, a wealthy Gulf emirate that underwrites the Al Jazeera networks and supported the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist political and social organization.

The United States issued a statement saying it was “deeply disappointed” by the outcome. But the Obama administration couldn’t have been surprised. There have been repeated abuses by the government of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, to which senior American officials, including Secretary of State John Kerry, have so far responded with the naïve hope that Cairo will soon grow out of its latest authoritarian phase.

The journalist denied her say in Azerbaijan was Khadija Ismayilova, a prominent radio host arrested last December on the absurd charge of inciting a friend and colleague to commit suicide. Ms. Ismayilova’s dogged reporting into corruption by senior government officials had rightly embarrassed President Ilham Aliyev. So did follow-up reporting by The Washington Post, which discovered that Mr. Aliyev’s 11-year-old son was listed as the owner of $44 million worth of real estate in Dubai.

If Ms. Ismayilova had been allowed to finish reading her prepared remarks in court, Judge Ramella Allahverdiyeva would have heard this stinging line: “I wish you a pleasant vacation after you read out the sentence. I wish you a day when you go on vacation without an aching and silenced conscience.”

Of the three VICE journalists detained last weekend, two — both British — were released. Mohammed Ismael Rasool, an Iraq-based journalist who was part of the VICE news team, was still being held. Turkish authorities also searched the offices of Koza Ipek Holding, a conglomerate that owns several news organizations, last week. The raid was described by editors at the organization as an effort to silence outlets that have given a voice to the opposition before parliamentary elections on Nov. 1.

The spate of cases against journalists warrants a more robust response from the international community. Interpol should develop a mechanism to disregard arrest requests filed in the cases of journalists who are clearly being prosecuted arbitrarily. That would be of little help to persecuted reporters who can’t, or don’t want to, leave home. But it would send a powerful signal. World leaders, meanwhile, should do more than issue paltry statements expressing “grave concern.” They should raise hell.

By THE EDITORIAL BOARDSEPT. 5, 2015