Mauritania
Editor faces an extended stay in prisonPosted Feb 13 2010
Retried on the same charges for which he already served a six-month sentence, Hanevy Ould Dehah, the editor of the online publication Taqadoumy was sentenced Feb. 2 to another two years in prison.
Ould Dehah was convicted again on the charge of “offending public decency,” which prompted his six-month term last year, in addition to charges of inciting revolt and “criminal publication,” according to Reporters Without Borders. In the original trial, RWB reports that, “…the court acquitted him on charges of defamation, inciting rebellion and inciting crimes and offences 'because of the absence of enforceable laws applicable to electronic media offences.”
The editor completed his original six-month sentence on Dec. 24 but was illegally detained until the opening of the new trial on Feb. 1. Ould Dehah's retrial failed to take into account the procedural errors committed in the first case. His lawyer, Ibrahim Ould Ebety, told The Committee to Protect Journalists, “It is bad enough that the first prison sentence was not rooted in law, because of the absence of provisions regulating online expression, but to retry my client and sentence him to another term is incomprehensible.”