AMMAN — Civic
space in Jordan has shrunk over the past four years as authorities persecute
and harass citizens organizing peacefully and engaging in political dissent,
Human Rights Watch (HRW) said on Sunday.
اضافة اعلان
In a lengthy report
published on its website, HRW accused “the authorities” of using vague and
abusive laws that criminalize free speech, association, and assembly. It said
that authorities detain, interrogate, and harass journalists, political
activists, and members of political parties and independent trade unions, and
their family members, and restrict their access to basic rights, such as work
and travel, to quash political dissent.
“There is an urgent
need to address the downward spiral on rights we are seeing in Jordan today,”
Lama Fakih, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch, was quoted as saying.
“‘Maintaining
stability’ can never be a justification for abusing people’s rights and closing
space that every society needs,” she added.
The report, titled
“Jordan: The Government Crushes Civic Space”, said that in 2020, the number of
cases related to these charges nearly doubled from the previous year, according
to annual reports issued by the National Center for Human Rights (
NCHR), HRW
said.
Despite numerous
attempts by J
ordan News to contact the NCHR’s president, they were
unavailable for comment. However, NCHR Media and Communication Officer Ahmed
Fahim told
Jordan News that: “We reject the description of Jordan as an
‘oppressive state’, and (the notion) that torture is ‘systematic’, or that
there are systematic campaigns to restrict freedoms.”
“But we acknowledge
the existence of some violations,” Fahim said.
Fahim stated that
the center has made various public statements against the implementation of the
Crime Prevention Law, governors’ powers of administrative detention, and notes
on the implementation of the Cybercrime Law.
The center,
according to Fahim, has followed up on a large number of complaints,
investigated many observations, and communicated with government agencies and
concerned parties, and has “resolved many”.
Suspended NCHR
Commissioner-General Ala’a Al-Armouti said that the general drift of the HRW
statement is correct, as it showed that there is a tendency to restrict freedom
of opinion, expression, association, and criticism of the government.
He told
Jordan
News that details mentioned in the report are consistent with what was
issued before by the NCHR, and stressed that “if the security grip continues
and the space for expression and freedoms decreases, this will deprive society
of the right to free expression.”
Freedoms are part
of human identity, he added.
Head of the Center
for the Protection of Freedom of Journalists (CPFJ), Nidal Mansour, told
Jordan
News that he agrees with the things mentioned in the report.
“It is clear that
the public space is getting restricted more and more while the government’s
acceptance of freedom of expression is declining too, and therefore we have a
real problem of censorship,” he said.
According to
Mansour, there is legislation that can be used to undermine the right of free
expression, but the most important challenge is that governments claim to hold
the only right opinion.
“While the government claims that it is carrying out
political reform programs, its practices do not support such reform,” he added.
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