No payout for EU 'fraud' reporter

A European Union court has rejected a claim for damages from a journalist who says he has been persecuted by the EU anti-fraud office, Olaf.

Hans-Martin Tillack was arrested by Belgian police and his files were seized after he exposed wrongdoing at the EU statistics agency, Eurostat.

He claimed damages from the European Commission, arguing that Olaf had triggered the Belgian police action.

But the court said there was no "causal link" between Olaf and his arrest.

Bribery allegation

Mr Tillack wrote two articles for Stern magazine in 2002 on alleged fraud at Eurostat, where large amounts of money were siphoned off into secret bank accounts.

Olaf then publicly accused "a journalist" of bribing one of its officials to obtain an internal memo.

It passed information to the authorities in Belgium and Germany, which led to Mr Tillack's arrest.

However, the EU's Court of First Instance ruled there was "not a sufficiently direct causal link between the forwarding of the information by Olaf to the Belgian judicial authorities and the damage claimed".

Mr Tillack denied paying for the Olaf memo, and accused Olaf of making the bribery allegation on the basis of rumour.

He took the case to the European Ombudsman, Nikiforos Diamandouros, who agreed that Olaf had made the allegation without a factual basis, and said this constituted a case of maladministration.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, 9 out of 10 detained without charge

On December 1, a total of 25 journalists were imprisoned in Sub-Saharan Africa in retaliation for their journalism, and nearly 90 percent of these journalists were detained without charges in secret detention facilities, according to an annual census of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Countries as wide ranging as Eritrea, Iran, and the United States were on the list of nations who had imprisoned journalists without charge. With at least 19 journalists behind bars, Eritrea by far leads the list of shame of African nations that imprison journalists. Eritrea holds this dubious distinction since 2001when the authorities abruptly closed the private press by arresting at least ten editors without charge or trial. The Eritrean government has refused to confirm if the detainees are still alive, even when unconfirmed online reports suggest that three journalists have died in detention. CPJ continues to list these journalists on its 2009 census as a means of holding the government responsible for their fates. In early 2009, the government arrested at least six more journalists from state media suspected of having provided information to news Web sites based outside the country. Eritrea’s neighbor, Ethiopia ranked second among African nations with journalists in jail. Four journalists were held in Ethiopian prisons, including two Eritrean journalists who are detained in secret locations without any formal charges or legal proceedings since late 2006. The Gambia, with its incommunicado detention of reporter Ebrima Chief Manneh since July 2006, and Cameroon, which has imprisoned the editor of a newspaper since September 2008, completes the list of imprisoned journalists for Sub-Saharan Africa.