CAPE TOWN, South Africa (AP) – Ethiopia is being urged to uphold its international commitments to the freedoms of expression and the press by releasing journalists it has imprisoned.
Two lawmakers in the U.S. Congress – Reps. Adam Schiff of California and Mary Gay Scanlon of Pennsylvania – have joined press freedom advocates in calling for the immediate release of journalist Amir Aman Kiyaro, who has been held for four months without charges.
Kiyaro’s continued detention is due to be reviewed in court Tuesday, when the state must formally charge him or release him, according to the judge in the case.
Ethiopia, which has adopted the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights and as a member of the African Union, should be obliged to release Kiyaro and other journalists, according to Schiff and Scanlon.
Kiyaro, 30, a video journalist accredited to The Associated Press, was detained Nov. 28 in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, under the country’s war-related state of emergency powers. The state of emergency was lifted in February as the government cited changing conditions in the deadly conflict between Ethiopian forces and those of the northern Tigray region. The Ethiopian government last week declared a “humanitarian truce” in the war-ravaged Tigray region.