CPJ Claims Moroccan Authorities Using Civil Law To Punish Editor From 2009 Wedding Cartoon Incident

This is only tangentially related to comics, but the original story kind of came and went without any follow-up at the time, so I was intrigued to hear about the awful echoes related to what at the time was as severe a cartoon-related persecution as we'd seen that calendar year. The Committee To Protect Journalists is blasting the judiciary in Morocco and calling on them to overturn a recent six-month and related fee sentence of Editor Taoufik Bouachrine on real estate and sales fraud. They claim that the charges were brought against the editor of Akhbar al-Youm, an independent daily, in part because of residual anger towards the editor over a 2009 Khalid Gueddar cartoon he ran depicting the wedding of Prince Moulay Ismail. Because of the cartoon the paper was shut down and both the cartoon and editor received suspended sentences. Not only does CPJ see these charges as an extension of those charges, it sees them as a new strategy to hit key journalists with unrelated criminal charges, all in the context of an overall crackdown on free press in the country.

 
posted 6:15 am PST | Permalink
 

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