In Mali, two more journalists arrested under cybercrime law for criticising authorities

"Malian authorities must stop their frenzied arrests of journalists, drop the charges against Abdrahamane Keïta and Chahana Takiou, and release them, as well as fellow journalist Youssouf Sissoko."

The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on Malian authorities to release two prominent journalists imprisoned last week for criticising the country’s embattled military government over its press freedom record and losses to insurgents.

“Malian authorities must stop their frenzied arrests of journalists, drop the charges against Abdrahamane Keïta and Chahana Takiou, and release them, as well as fellow journalist Youssouf Sissoko,” said Moussa Ngom, CPJ’s Francophone Africa representative. “It is ironic that Malian authorities used the cybercrime law to arrest Chahana Takiou for speaking out about its misuse against the press. They have only proven that his comments were 100 per cent accurate.”

The cybercrime unit was set up in 2022 and given the power to use eight legal texts to prosecute online offenses. The vague wording of the 2019 cybercrimes law eliminates the protection that journalists had under the 2000 press law with lighter sentences. Instead, they can be subject to the same weighty penalties as ordinary citizens.

On 8 June, the National Cybercrime Unit ordered the arrest of Chahana Takiou, publishing director of the biweekly 22 Septembre newspaper, over his comments at a media forum. Mr Takiou condemned the two-year sentence handed down to journalist Youssouf Sissoko in March for “undermining the state’s credibility” with a newspaper commentary about neighbouring Niger’s president that was shared on social media.

“He should have been tried under the press law, but since the advent of the cybercrime law, judges have been superbly ignoring it,” Mr Takiou said to a prosecutor on a discussion panel.

Mr Takiou was remanded in prison in the capital, Bamako, pending trial on 27 July, under the cybercrime law, for “undermining the state’s reputation through the judicial system.”

Arrested for comment about militants

On 9 June, the cybercrime unit also summoned and detained Abdrahamane Keïta, director of Le Témoin newspaper, after he stated on the popular TV programme “Grand Jury” that Al-Qaeda linked JNIM insurgents control Mali’s northern city of Kidal.

In a series of coordinated attacks on multiple towns in April, JNIM and Mali’s separatist Azawad Liberation Front (FLA) took Kidal from the Malian army and its Russian allies, and killed the defense minister, demonstrating the militants’ growing strength.

Mr Keïta will face trial on 17 August for “a crime of a regionalist nature that tends to undermine national unity and the credibility of the state” and publishing false information, said the Press House, Mali’s largest press association.

Article 54 of the cybercrime law allows the cybercrime unit to prosecute journalists under ordinary criminal penalties that often stipulate several years in jail, except for offenses committed by the “press on the Internet” — a term that is not defined.

The cybercrimes unit’s first deputy prosecutor Mohamed Timbiné told local media this month that newspaper journalists whose work is shared on social media can be prosecuted for cybercrimes.

“Someone who defames in a newspaper, for example … if the publication is not on social networks, effectively it is the law of 2000 that applies. But if afterwards, these same writings end up on social networks and it has consequences on social networks, naturally, it is the 2019 law on cybercrime that applies, even if the person is a journalist, because this law applies to everyone without exception,” he said.

CPJ’s calls to the cybercrime unit went unanswered.