Statement: Almasdar demands the release of the kidnapped journalists

On the sixth anniversary of the Houthi kidnapping of nine Yemeni journalists in Sana’a, including a staff member of Almasdar Media Corporation, Tawfiq Al-Mansoori, we remind the world of this forgotten tragedy and emphasize that journalists deserve protection and support as they put their lives at risk while performing their duties to defend the rights of society.

We call on all local and international organizations concerned with defending rights and public freedoms to take serious action to save the lives of four of these detained journalists, whose lives are at increased risk behind bars as a result of their deteriorating health and denied access to medical treatment.

The dangers facing journalists detained in prisons controlled by Houthi militia are reflected in the death sentence issued by a Houthi-controlled court based upon fabricated charges. Journalists who remained in Sana’a after the outbreak of the war constituted a source of inconvenience to the Houthis as the group tightened its grip on the capital. As a result, the Houthis moved to eliminate any presence of media that did not adopt its vision, subjecting many of them to enforced disappearance, psychological and physical torture.

The dire situation of press freedom in Yemen today reveals either the weakness and inability or the lack of seriousness of the world in defending freedom of the press, which is one of the finest forms of human development.

The Houthi coup and the war they have waged have devastated what generations of Yemenis fought for and sacrificed since the launch of the national movement in the mid-1930s.

The September 1962 and October 1963 revolutions and Yemeni unity on May 22, 1990, which was linked to political pluralism and freedom of the press, and the peaceful revolution in February 2011, represented important milestones that constituted a shift in expanding the margins of press freedom. The Arab Spring-inspired revolution expanded the space for journalists to address public issues and express their critical opinions of the performance of government and other decision-makers and opened the door to owning audio-visual media for the first time in the history of Yemen. The Houthi coup marked a terrible setback for press freedom, public freedoms and human rights. It has led to the elimination of jobs for hundreds of journalists whose reporting was their only source of income, while dozens of them were pushed into exile or displaced to other areas of the country.

We renew our call to the United Nations envoy to Yemen and the ambassadors of the countries sponsoring the peace process in Yemen to play their role in putting pressure on the Houthi militia to release journalist Tawfiq Al-Mansoori and his colleagues Abdul-Khaleq Omran, Akram Al-Walidi and Harith Hamid, and to reveal the fate of journalist Waheed Al-Sufi, who was forcibly disappeared in Sana'a in early 2015.

We express our full and absolute solidarity with all of our colleagues who have been kidnapped and forcibly disappeared in prisons affiliated with armed groups or de facto authorities, and we stress the need to work to reveal the fate of journalist Muhammad Al-Maqri, who was kidnapped by Al-Qaeda extremists during its control of the city of Mukalla in Hadramout governorate in 2015.

Editorial Board of Almasdar Media Corporation