BRUSSELS, Feb 7 (KUNA) -- The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) Monday announced that together with the Yemeni Journalists Syndicate (YJS) they are launching an emergency call on the global journalism community to join the campaign to put pressure on the Houthi authorities to release four Yemeni colleagues and save their lives.
Four Yemeni journalists have been detained by the Houthis in Sanaآ’a, Yemen, since 2015, and are now on the death row after being condemned for their work as journalists, said the IFJ in a statement.
Abdul Khaleq Amran, Tawfiq Al-Mansouri, Harith Hamid, and Akram Al-Walidi were arrested together with five other journalists on 9 June 2015 at the Hotel Dream Castle in Sanaآ’a.
Their arrest was motivated by their reporting on human rights violations committed by Houthi forces, who charged them with "espionage for foreign states and spreading fake news," it said. Since their arrest, they have been subjected to a series of crimes, including forced disappearance, physical and psychological torture, denial of the right to be visited and the right to have access to medical care. These actions break all international conventions and norms on the treatment of prisoners, it said .
The IFJ campaign will launch an open letter to the United Nationآ’s envoy to Yemen to treat this case as an urgent matter and put pressure on relevant government and intergovernmental bodies to demand that this issue has a priority in his agenda, IFJ General Secretary, Anthony Bellanger, said: "We need to hear the UN, the EU and governments across the world stand up for journalists and unequivocally tell Ansar Allah (Houthis) and the de facto government in Sanaa that torturing and executing journalists is a war crime and that the world should not tolerate war criminals".
"But that's not all. We must send a message to our friends Abdul, Tawfiq, Harith and Akram and their families that they are not alone and the whole global journalism community and freedom of expression and human rights activists will relentlessly work for their freedom", he concluded.
The Brussels-based IFJ represents around 600,000 journalists across 146 countries worldwide.(end) nk.rk