Intimidation & harassment of Salah Dabouz

On 7 August 2019, Salah Dabouz suspended a hunger strike which he had started on 8 July 2019. The human rights defender intends to pursue alternative protest methods to promote a more just judicial system in Ghardaia.

On 8 July 2019, human rights defender and lawyer Salah Dabouz started an open-ended hunger strike in protest at the judicial harassment he has been facing since 9 April 2019.

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Salah Dabouz is a prominent Algerian human rights defender and a defense attorney representing several activists across Algeria. Salah Dabouz previously served as the President of the Ligue Algérienne pour la Défense des Droits de l’Homme (Algerian League for the Defence of Human Rights, LADDH), an independent association founded in 1985 and working on the documentation of human rights violations in Algeria committed by security services and armed groups. Salah Dabouz is also a member of the Commission on Human Rights of the International Union of Lawyers and a founding member of the Autonomous Union of Lawyers in Algeria.

On 8 July 2019, the human rights defender went on hunger strike which he started to denounce the judicial harassment against him and the subsequent rejection of all the complaints he tried to lodge with the different judicial authorities to demand justice for his clients and himself.

Salah Dabouz was arrested on 8 April 2019 by security forces during a meeting in a restaurant in the capital. The human rights defender was taken to the city of Ghardaia where he was questioned about his posts on Facebook criticising the judicial authority in Ghardaia. He was released the following day but kept under “Judicial Observation”. As part of this procedure, he has to appear at the police station in Ghardaia every Wednesday and Sunday. The city is located about 600 km from Algiers, where the human rights defender lives and works. This excessive administrative procedure has not been used since 1962 in Algeria, indicating that it constitutes an act of retaliation against the human rights defender and an attempt to prevent him from carrying out his work as a human rights lawyer and participating in the protests in the capital.

To oppose this arbitrary procedure, Salah Dabouz filed numerous complaints with the Republic’s Prosecutor against the Prosecutor General of the city of Ghardaia, as well as an unsuccessful request to have the procedure lifted. The Court of First Instance dismissed his complaints without reference to the Supreme Court, even though the Algerian law on criminal procedures requires that. Instead, on 30 April 2019, the Court of First Instance confirmed the "Judicial Observation" of Salah Dabouz and extended the measure by one additional day per week.

In two instances in June 2019, the Clerk of the Indictment Division of the Court of First Instance refused to give him a copy of the file and refused to take the request, referring to instructions from the president of the Court.

On 27 June 2019, Salah Dabouz submitted a complaint to the Prosecutor’s Office for insults and death threats he received in front of the Court of Ghardaia.

Following the same pattern, Salah Dabouz’s clients and fellow human rights defenders Hadj Ibrahim Aouf and Kamal Eddine Fekhar were also arrested and harassed. They declared an open-ended hunger strike to protest against their arbitrary arrest which led to their transfer to a health facility in atrocious conditions, an incident that ended with the death of prominent human rights defender Kamal Eddine Fekhar as a result of medical negligence. Aouf Hadj Brahim was released on 30 May 2019 upon the death of his co detainee Kamal Eddine Fekhar, and now suffers serious medical consequences resulting from the incarceration and the medical negligence he suffered during his hunger strike. He is being subjected to the same judicial observation procedure as Salah Dabouz.

There are four pending cases against Aouf Hadj Ibrahim that are linked to his trade union work and his work exposing and denouncing corruption committed by state institutions in Ghardaia on social media. The human rights defender is facing charges of “incitement to hatred”, “insulting state institutions” and “defamation”.

The pattern of escalating judicial harassment of human rights defenders, journalists, trade union activists, and student activists along with the alarming number of arrests during the recent protests, come amid a complex political context and an increasing level of violence from the side of the military de facto leader of the state, Ahmed Gaid Salah. The interim chief of state Abdelkader Ben Salah’s mandate came to an end on 9 July 2019 and no timeline for the upcoming elections has been set yet which pushes the country towards a constitutional crisis.

Front Line Defenders is extremely concerned at the escalating judicial harassment of minority rights defenders in Algeria and believes it is solely motivated by their peaceful and legitimate work in the defence of human rights in Algeria and the exercise of their right to freedom of expression to denounce corruption, injustice and human rights violations.

26 April 2019 marks the 27th day of the open-ended hunger strike of human rights defenders Kamal Eddine Fekhar and Hadj Ibrahim Aouf.

Kamal Eddine Fekhar, Mozabite minority rights defender, founder of Tifawt and member of the Algerian League for the Defence of Human Rights, was arrested near his workplace along with his two minor children on 31 March 2019. On the same day, trade unionist and minority rights defender Hadj Ibrahim Aouf was also arrested. The human rights defenders were detained for attacking public institutions, namely the military, Parliament and judiciary, based on a complaint made by the general prosecutor of the city of Ghardaia. They declared an open-ended hunger strike to protest against their arbitrary arrest. The health of Hadj Ibrahim Aouf is rapidly deteriorating, as he is entering the 27th day of hunger strike.

The arrest of the human rights defenders forms part of a pattern of ongoing retaliation against human rights defenders, journalists, student activists, trade unionists and lawyers, which has intensified since the start of massive protests in the country.

On 17 April 2019, armed agents from the Research and Intervention Brigade (BRI), wearing plain clothes, broke into the Said Hamdine Faculty of Law in Algiers to pursue and arrest student activists who were gathering there.

On 13 April 2019, police stopped several activists as they attempted to join a sit-in planned for 5:00 pm in front of the main post office in Algiers. They were arrested and taken to Baraki’s police station. A journalist and three women activists from the association Rassemblement Action Jeunesse (RAJ) were forced to strip naked. One of the RAJ activists said that at 9:00 pm, they were taken to a room where a woman in plain clothes, who claimed to be a police officer, said she would conduct a body search and ordered the women to strip naked. As stated by one of the activists, they were threatened that they would not be released unless they got completely naked. Upon their release on 14 April 2019 at 1:00 am, the women activists reported ill-treatment by the police officers.

Abdou Semmar, a journalist actively working on exposing corruption in Algeria, currently exiled in France, received threats on several occasions and on 10 April 2019, his wife’s car was burnt to the ground in front of her workplace in Oued Romen, Algiers. The human rights defender reports on corruption and abuse of powAbdou Semmarer in Algeria through the Paris based media outlet Algeria Part.

On 8 April 2019, Salah Dabouz, a lawyer, human rights defender and former President of the Algerian League for the Defence of Human Rights (LADDH), was arrested by security forces during a meeting in a restaurant in the capital. The human rights defender was taken to the city of Ghardaia where he was questioned about his posts on Facebook criticising the judiciary. He was released the next day but kept under “administrative observation”. As part of this procedure, he has to appear at the police station in Ghardaia every Wednesday and Sunday. The city is located around 600 km from Algiers, where the human rights defender lives and works. This procedure is a clear attempt to stop Salah Dabouz from participating in the protests in the capital.

On 7 April 2019, Meziane Abane, a journalist at Al Watan newspaper and human rights defender advocating for the rights of the Amazigh people in Algeria, was arrested while he was covering the protests. He saw members of the security forces chasing protesters and arresting those who resisted. When police officers ordered the human rights defender to leave, he refused, saying he was a journalist doing his job. They arrested him along with eight protesters and took them to the Rue Asslah Hocine police station, where they were held for hours.

Abdullah Benaoum is a human rights defender and social media activist, currently serving a one-year prison sentence in solitary confinement for politically motivated charges related to his human rights activism in Algeria. 26 April 2019 marks the 47th day of his hunger strike, which he has started to denounce the inhumane conditions of his detention. The human rights defender’s health has been rapidly deteriorating due to the length of his hunger strike and prior health issues.

22 April 2019 marked two months since peaceful demonstrations erupted in Algerian cities on 22 February 2019 to prevent President Abdelaziz Bouteflika from seeking a 5th mandate after holding power for nearly 20 years. Up until 2011, Algeria was under a state of emergency with an increasingly shrinking space for civil society and massive targeting of human rights defenders, lawyers, journalists, bloggers and human rights organisations.

As a result of public pressure, President Bouteflika announced that he would not be running for office again. Yet millions of Algerians called for him to step down immediately due to his clear physical incapacity to serve as president, as he had hardly appeared in public or addressed the nation in the last 5 years. The protesters’ demands for transparency and the peaceful transfer of power were only partially met. In an open letter to the Algerian people, President Bouteflika declared that he would resign on 2 April 2019, before the end of his mandate set for 28 April 2019.

On 9 April 2019, the Parliament appointed the President of the Nation Council (upper house of the Parliament) Abdel Kader Ben Salah as interim president for 90 days. According to Article 102 of the Constitution, during this period, he should convene presidential elections.

Meanwhile, peaceful protests continued to grow in Algeria, opposing the constitutional solution suggested by the government and calling for a peaceful transition and accountability for all the crimes committed by the allies of Abdelaziz Bouteflika, including the military.

The change of the head of state was accompanied by some positive changes, as several businessmen and state officials known to have engaged in corruption were arrested or summoned for interrogation by the judicial police. Yet, despite the government’s promises of a peaceful, democratic transition, the human rights situation in the country remains unstable. Security forces, initially neutral towards the popular uprising, have started to act more violently in order to repress the social movement, and several incidents of excessive use of force have been reported.

During the first week of protests, on 23 February 2019, the Directorate General of National Security (DGSN) declared the arrest of 41 people on charges of disruption of public order, acts of vandalism, violence and assault.

Front Line Defenders strongly condemns the ongoing wave of arbitrary arrests and repression by the Algerian authorities targeting human rights defenders, journalists, student activists, trade unionists and lawyers.