Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders Annual Report 2004 - Côte d'Ivoire

Threats and intimidation of MIDH⁶⁵

On 19 and 20 April 2004, a man who claimed to be an activist in the Rally of the Republicans (Rassemblement des Républicains – RDR, opposition party) entered the headquarters of the Ivorian Movement for Human Rights (Mouvement ivoirien pour les droits humains – MIDH) and said that he could provide information on efforts by people close to the government to organise an attempt to assassinate Mr. Amourlaye Touré, the MIDH president, who was at that time participating in the 60th session of the UN Commission on Human Rights held in Geneva from 15 March to 23 April 2004. Mr. Touré could only be informed of this threat on 2 May 2004.

This occurred while the MIDH was preparing a report entitled Abidjan: fierce repression of demonstration organised by the opposition party: 25 March to 1 April 2004 (Abidjan : répression violente de la marche de l'opposition politique : 25 mars au 1er avril 2004) on police repression of the demonstration held in Abidjan on 25 March 2004 by the opposition and during which dozens of demonstrators were killed. The report was published on 28 April 2004. Until some time in May 2004, the MIDH headquarters in Abidjan received several anonymous phone calls threatening to kill Mr. Amourlaye Touré, Mr. Drissa Traoré, MIDH vice chairman, and some of their colleagues. Further, several leaders of the Alliance of the Young Patriots (Alliance des jeunes patriotes), a movement supporting President Gbagbo, were seen milling around the MIDH offices for a few days just after the report was published.

On 6 November 2004, two armed soldiers went to the Centre for the Promotion of Non-Violence and Democratic Culture (Centre pour la Promotion de la Non-Violence et de la Culture Démocratique – CNVD) created by MIDH in January 2004, and ordered the guardian of the building to let them into the offices. The Centre had stopped all of its activities on 4 November 2004, when hostilities were reignited between the government forces and the rebels, so the two soldiers left the building since there was no one in the CNVD office.

Further, as of end 2004, there was still no reaction to the complaint lodged by MIDH in April 2003 when the association's headquarters were attacked by three armed men who also violently beat up an employee on duty.

[Refworld note: This report as posted on the FIDH website (www.fidh.org) was in pdf format with country chapters run together by region. Footnote numbers have been retained here, so do not necessarily begin at 1.]

65. See Annual Report 2003.