Ten international NGOs including Amnesty International and Oxfam on Friday called for the release of 26 civil society activists who have been detained since March after a banned demonstration in Niamey.
In a joint statement published on Oxfam’s website, they called on “the authorities in Niger to ease the situation by releasing the detainees and bring an end to the prosecutions”.
Adama Coulibaly, Oxfam’s regional director for West Africa, said in the statement: “This situation is of deep concern for international human rights and development organisations who believe that widening the civic space does not impinge on the government, but instead allow citizens to engage in a constructive dialogue with the authorities.”
The majority of the 26 detainees, including three leaders of civil society organisations, were arrested on 25 March after banned clashes in Niamey between police and protesters.
The 26 were prosecuted for “organisation and participation in a forbidden march” and “complicity in degrading public and private property,” according to their lawyers.
On May 11, their lawyers denounced the slowness in the judicial process and said that they had filed with the prosecutor a complaint over the “arbitrary detention” of their clients.
All the defendants were eventually heard between 14 and 17 May by an investigating judge in the presence of lawyers.
Since October 2017 and the preparation of the 2018 budget, elements of civil society, the political opposition and some unions have regularly organised demonstrations to demand “the abrogation” of the finance law.
In defense, the Finance minister Hassoumi Massadou in February said that the 2018 budget would “barely affect” people in the countryside, where more than 80 percent of Niger’s 20 million people live.
Some of the NGO’s include Oxfam, Amnesty International, Front Line Defenders, Publiez Ce Que Vous Payez (Publish What You Pay), Tournons La Page (Let’s Turn the Page), FIDH/OMCT, and West Africa civil society Institute among others.
