Censorship in Algeria
Open-knowledge reference entry
The working conditions of journalists in Algeria have evolved since the 1962 independence. After 1990, the Code of Press was suppressed, allowing for greater freedom of press. However, with the civil war in the 1990s, more than 70 journalists were assassinated by terrorists. Sixty journalists were killed between 1993 and 1998 in Algeria.
1990s-2000s
In the 1990s to the 2000s, President Abdelaziz Bouteflika ordered several newspaper closures, imprisoned journalists such as Mohammad Benchicou, director of Le Matin and author of a critical biography of Bouteflika, and forced other reporters into exile, mostly in France.
Reporters Without Borders's (RSF in French) index for freedom of press gives approximatively 40 for Algeria since five years (although the figure has increased, signifying a lesser freedom of press). Along with L'Humanité newspaper, RSF did denounce the imprisonment of Mohammad Benchicou, director of Le Matin, who was sentenced to two years in prison for denouncing corruption in Algeria. Benchicou was awarded in 2006 the PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award.
Algeria continued to experience many attacks on freedom of press, apart from Mohammad Benchicou's imprisonment. The La Tribune newspaper was closed in 1996 and the Sam blog was censored in March 2006.
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This entry incorporates text from “Censorship in Algeria” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.