Mozambique: NGO asks state to use “all means” to locate journalist Ibraimo Mbaruco

Login

Register

http://www.clubofmozambique.com/

Mozambique: NGO asks state to use “all means” to locate journalist Ibraimo Mbaruco

1:52 CAT | 07 Oct 2020

Photo: Voa Portugues

The Centre for Democracy and Development, a Mozambican non-governmental organisation, has asked the Mozambican state to use “all means at its disposal” to find Ibraimo Mbaruco, the journalist who disappeared six months ago in Cabo Delgado.

“The Mozambican state must use all the means at its disposal to find Ibraimo Mbaruco and return him to his family,” director of the Centre for Democracy and Development (CDD) Adriano Nuvunga said.

A journalist at the Palma Community Radio in Cabo Delgado, Mbaruco disappeared on April 7 in circumstances yet to be fully explained, family members and a radio source told Lusa at the time.

Nuvunga was speaking yesterday on the sidelines of the launch of the National Network of Human Rights Defenders, an initiative that brings together Mozambican civil society organizations and which aims to “strengthen the capacity and resilience of human rights defenders, as well as improve their protection and security”.

“The first major statement of the network born today is in relation to the journalist who will tomorrow complete another month of forced disappearance,” Nuvunga said.

For Custódio Duma, former president of the National Human Rights Commission, the journalist’s situation shows the limits of press freedom in Mozambique.

“It is not known where he is, or whether he is alive. The sequence of human rights violations that has occurred is emblematic, and one that we must all condemn, every day,” Duma said.

“It is bad for all of us. For Mozambique, because it is a talking point at the United Nations and in the African Union, and is costing the country its reputation,” he added, saying that the country “must create conditions to better protect its activists”.

The appeal came after the NGO Social Communication Institute of Southern Africa (Misa Mozambique) also yesterday urged the authorities to multiply efforts to locate the journalist.

Lusa tried, unsuccessfully, to obtain a position from the Mozambican authorities, who have given assurances that they are not responsible for the journalist’s disappearance, and say that the case is under investigation.

Several international organisations, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the European Union, have expressed concern at the journalist’s disappearance and asked the authorities to clarify the case.

Cabo Delgado, a region where mega-projects for the extraction of natural gas are advancing, are faced with attacks by armed groups classified as a terrorist threat and which have killed more than 1,000 people in the last three years, causing a humanitarian crisis that has affected more than 250,000 people.

Source: Lusa