Weekly threatened by court order confiscating its earnings in four-year old libel case

Reporters Without Borders today condemned a court order confiscating the earnings of Le Journal Hebdomadaire, saying it was clearly designed to put one of Morocco's leading independent weeklies out of business. The newspaper was told on 18 September that its earnings and those of Assahifa, an Arabic-language weekly belonging to the same group, are to be seized as a result of a libel action brought by foreign minister Mohammed Benaïssa in 2001. Benaïssa obtained a summary judgment ordering payment of 700,000 dirhams (63,000 euros) in damages, although the case is pending before the supreme court. Reporters Without Borders said it was "very concerned" that the threat to the Journal Hebdomadaire's survival has come at moment when the monarchy is very upset by its critical reporting and its revelations about Hicham Mandari, a Moroccan citizen murdered in Spain in August who had access to the palace under the late King Hassan II and who claimed to know state secrets. "The only solution that would respect press freedom and at the same time show that Morocco's judges are independent would be for the court of cassation to point out the procedural shortcomings in the appeal court ruling and thereby overturn the confiscation order that could put the newspaper out of business," the organisation said. Reached by telephone, Journal Hebdomadaire editor Ali Amar recalled that the authorities had originally banned his newspaper in December 2000, when it was called Le Journal, and it had reappeared three months later under its present name. Since then, "the authorities have no longer dared attack us frontally," he told Reporters Without Borders. "Instead, they now always proceed in the same way. First, a smear campaign orchestrated by the regime's security agents in certain newspapers. Then the real problems start : an exhaustive tax review or an advertising boycott. This time the authorities decided to revive a four-year-old libel suit in order to strangle us financially." Amar said the smear campaign against him and the Journal Hebdomadaire began after it published an interview with Mandari at the end of July 2003. A special issue entitled "Five years without him," giving a critical assessment of the first five years of King Mohammed VI's reign also irked the authorities. In the Benaïssa libel case, Amar and Aboubakr Jamaï, the newspaper's managing editor, were originally fined 2 million dirhams in February 2001 and were given a suspended prison sentenced. The fine was reduced on appeal to 700,000 dirhams.