Kurdish journalists condemn prison sentence

The Association of Kurdistan Journalists (AKJ) denounced the sentencing of a Kurdish writer to 18 months in prison for defaming local officials in the semi-autonomous northern Kurdish region of the country. "The government should have adopted another way of dealing with the journalist and this issue," said AKJ member Abdul-Ghani Botani. On 26 March, a court in the city of Arbil, 350 km north of the capital, Baghdad, handed down the sentence against writer and Austrian dual-national Kamal Karim. Karim’s articles accused Massoud Barzani, president of the Kurdistan regional government of Iraq and head of the ruling Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), of corruption. The articles appeared in the Kurdistan Post, an independent website devoted to Kurdish and national news. "Whatever mistake the journalist made doesn't justify the arrest," said Botani. "These acts could send the country back to the age of dictatorship." Regional officials, meanwhile, defended the move. "There was no unfairness in this case,” said regional Minister of Justice Hadi Ali. “Karim was sentenced according to Iraqi defamation laws." The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has condemned the sentence and demanded the writer’s immediate release. “It's an outrage and sad reflection of press freedom in Iraqi Kurdistan that Kamel Karim is imprisoned for expressing his opinion,” said CPJ Executive Director Ann Cooper. “Kurdish officials say they support democracy, but that’s belied when a journalist is thrown in jail for what he wrote,” Cooper added. “Iraqi authorities are following the poor example of their neighbours, who routinely detain, criminally prosecute or imprison reporters for their work.” In a similar incident in February, a Kurdish journalist for local daily Hawalati was arrested by security forces in Sulaimaniyah for writing an article critical of local authorities. Hawez Hawezi was detained for three days before being released on bail.