Three prisoners of conscience were released at the end of the year. At least 100 people arrested in 1995 and 1996, including possible prisoners of conscience, remained detained without trial. There were reports of ill-treatment by the security forces. Some 10 officers and an unknown number of soldiers held incommunicado since November 1995 on suspicion of plotting a coup were punished or cleared of all charges in November. More than 200 criminal prisoners and six political prisoners died in detention in Abidjan and Gagnoa as a result of extremely harsh conditions. One person was sentenced to death but there were no executions. The political unrest that followed the presidential elections in October 1995, and led to the arrest of dozens of opposition party supporters including possible prisoners of conscience, had subsided by the beginning of the year. A publisher and two journalists from the newspaper La Voie, all prisoners of conscience, received presidential pardons and were released at the end of the year. One of the journalists, Freedom Neruda, was arrested in January and sentenced to two years' imprisonment. The others, Aboudrahmane Sangaré, Deputy Secretary General of the Front populaire ivoirien (FPI), Popular Ivorian Front, and Director of La Voie, and another journalist, Emmanuel Koré, had received the same sentence in December 1995. All three were convicted of insulting President Henri Konan Bédié in an article which suggested that his presence brought bad luck to a football team. In August, the three prisoners had refused a presidential pardon because it was conditional on their withdrawing their appeal to the Supreme Court. Some 20 people, including possible prisoners of conscience, sentenced to terms of imprisonment after the October 1995 events were released in August following a presidential pardon. They had been prosecuted under a law passed in 1992, but not previously invoked, under which anyone who calls or leads a gathering is held accountable for any violence that occurs, even if he or she did not personally incite or use violence (see Amnesty International Report 1996). A number of other detainees held in connection with the October 1995 events were provisionally released or had their sentences reduced on appeal, but at the end of the year at least 100, including possible prisoners of conscience, remained detained without trial on charges under this law. At the beginning of the year, there were further arrests linked to the events of October 1995. In January, 11 people were arrested in Guiberoua, in the west. They were charged with looting camps belonging to the Baoulé ethnic group, of which President Konan Bédié is a member, during the October 1995 election period when ethnic tension developed between Baoulé villagers and the majority ethnic group, the Bétés, to which Laurent Gbagbo, leader of the opposition FPI, belongs. By the end of the year, at least 80 Bétés remained in detention without trial in Gagnoa in relation to the October events. Student activists belonging to the Fédération estudiantine et scolaire de Côte d'Ivoire (FESCI), Ivorian Federation of Students and School Pupils, continued to face harassment by the security forces (see Amnesty International Report 1996). Two press conferences held by FESCI in May and in August at Youpougon University in Abidjan were broken up by members of the security forces who beat and otherwise ill-treated the students, some of whom were briefly detained. In December, four FESCI leaders were arrested and held incommunicado for four days. They were charged with incitement to violence, although there was no evidence to substantiate the charges. All of them appeared to be prisoners of conscience, detained solely because of their membership of FESCI. Some 10 officers and an unknown number of soldiers, arrested in November 1995, were held incommunicado for most of the year. They were accused of plotting a coup. In November, some were released after receiving 16 months' suspension from duty, others were cleared of all charges and seven were dismissed from the army and remained in prison awaiting trial. According to some sources, these soldiers were arrested because they obeyed their Chief of Staff, who was reportedly reluctant to use the army to maintain order during the turbulent October 1995 elections. During the year, more than 200 criminal prisoners held at the Maison d'arrêt et de correction d'Abidjan (MACA), the main prison in Abidjan, died apparently as a result of gross medical neglect, poor hygiene and malnutrition. Six opposition party supporters died during the year after several months of detention without trial in the MACA and in the Gagnoa prison. They had been arrested in the wake of the October 1995 demonstrations. Some 5,000 prisoners were held in the MACA, around a third of whom had been awaiting trial for several years. In July, André Ossey Ayékoué was sentenced to death after being convicted of three murders, but had not been executed by the end of the year. The legislation passed by parliament in 1995 to extend the scope of the death penalty (see Amnesty International Report 1996) had not been promulgated by the President and no executions were reported. In May, Amnesty International published a report, Côte d'Ivoire: Government opponents are the target of systematic repression, in which it expressed concern at the prolonged detention without trial of more than 200 government opponents and at the conviction of dozens of them under a law introducing the concept of joint responsibility. The organization also called for the immediate release of all the prisoners of conscience including the two journalists and the publisher of La Voie newspaper.

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