In the DRC, Stanis Bujakera, deputy publishing director of Actualité.CD and correspondent for Jeune Afrique and Reuters in Kinshasa, has been in detention for more than a week.
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Stanis Bujakera has been in Makala prison for several days. The journalist is being prosecuted for spreading false rumors and disseminating false information for an article published by Young Africa implicating military intelligence in the assassination of the former minister Cherub Okendeeven though he is not the author of the article.
After being interviewed three times, he was transferred to the Kinshasa Gombe public prosecutor’s office and placed under a provisional arrest warrant. Since his arrest, numerous voices from the media, political leaders, human rights defenders or even Western chancelleries have expressed themselves in particular to demand his immediate release.
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This is the case for Amnesty International. Jean-Mobert Senga, researcher for the organization, was contacted by Paulina Zidi from the Africa editorial team.
“ We are all the more concerned that his most basic rights have not been respected, that the offenses for which he is being prosecuted are clearly incriminations linked to his profession, which should not take place in a state of law. And that it is beyond the person of Stanis, it is the entire corporation and all independent journalists who are threatened in the DRC. It’s been several months since things got tense. The situation of journalists never improved under the regime of Félix Tshisekedi, the situation of human rights in general.
There were some glimmers at the start of his mandate, in 2019, and afterward it started again at the same pace, with the same methods as under previous regimes. But the worst is that the authorities are now increasingly using a falsely nationalist narrative to silence all those whose voice disturbs, whose work disturbs… Including, in this case, journalists like Stanis . »
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