Eskinder Nega, Freelance
Medium:Internet
Charge:Anti-state
Imprisoned:September 14, 2011

Ethiopian security forces arrested Eskinder, a prominent online columnist and former publisher and editor of now-shuttered newspapers, on vague accusations of involvement in a terrorism plot. The arrest came five days after Eskinder published a column on the U.S.-based news website EthioMedia that criticized the government for misusing the country's sweeping anti-terrorism law to jail prominent journalists and dissident intellectuals.

CPJ believes the charges are part of a pattern of government persecution of Eskinder in reprisal for his coverage. In 2011, police detained Eskinder and threatened him in connection with his online columns that drew comparisons between the Egyptian uprising and Ethiopia's 2005 pro-democracy protests, according to news reports. His coverage of the Ethiopian government's repression of the 2005 protests landed him in jail for 17 months on anti-state charges at the time. After his release in 2007, authorities banned his newspapers and denied him licenses to start new ones. He was first arrested in September 1993 in connection with his articles in the Amharic weekly Ethiopis, one of the country's first independent newspapers, about the government's crackdown on dissent in Western Ethiopia, according to CPJ research.

Shortly after Eskinder's 2011 arrest, state television portrayed the journalist as a spy for "foreign forces" and accused him of having links with the banned opposition movement Ginbot 7, which the Ethiopian government designated a terrorist entity. In an interview with Agence France-Presse, government spokesman Shimelis Kemal accused the detainee of plotting "a series of terrorist acts that would likely wreak havoc." Eskinder consistently proclaimed his innocence, but was convicted on the basis of a video of a public town hall meeting in which he discussed the possibility of a popular uprising in Ethiopia if the ruling party did not deliver democratic reform, according to reports.

In July 2012, a federal high court judge in Addis Ababa sentenced Eskinder to 18 years in prison, according to local journalists and news reports. Five exiled journalists were convicted in absentia at the same time.

Also in 2012, a U.N. panel found that Eskinder's imprisonment was "a result of his peaceful exercise of the right to freedom of expression," according to a report published in April 2013.

In May 2013, Ethiopia's Supreme Court rejected an appeal and upheld the sentence. Eskinder was being held at Kality Prison in Addis Ababa, with restricted visitation rights.

In January 2014, the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers awarded him its annual Golden Pen of Freedom award.

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