A CPJ investigation found Bassène could never have committed the crime, yet Senegal’s Supreme Court dismissed Bassène’s final appeal of a life sentence on May 3, 2025. Bassène was finalizing a fourth book on the separatist conflict in southern Senegal at the time of his arrest.

“As a son of Casamance, I wrote out of duty, for posterity so that the history of this conflict would not disappear from the collective memory and that it would never happen again,” said Bassène from the Aristide Le Dantec hospital in Dakar, the Senegalese capital, where he underwent a June 4 to repair an eardrum perforated during his arrest. He added, “I thank from the bottom of my heart all the signatories who believe in my innocence and are fighting for my release.”

Read the full letter in English here and in French here.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

“It is deeply worrying that René Capain Bassène’s life sentence has been upheld despite all the flaws in the investigation that led to his imprisonment and the documented abuses he suffered behind bars,” said Moussa Ngom, CPJ’s representative for Francophone Africa. “Senegalese authorities must clarify the current conditions of detention of René Capain Bassène and implement all possible means to ensure his release.”

Following the Supreme Court’s ruling, Bassène was transferred overnight on May 3 to the Senegalese capital of Dakar, where he was placed in a special ward for sick detainees at Aristide Le Dantec Hospital.

Bassène was arrested in 2018 in connection with the deaths of 14 loggers shot to death in the Bayotte Forest in the southern Casamance area of Senegal. In 2022, he was sentenced to life in prison for complicity in murder, attempted murder, and criminal association. 

A 2025 CPJ investigation found that the case against Bassène was severely flawed, as the journalist’s co-accused were forced to implicate him or sign inaccurate interview records. CPJ also found that the case relied on inconsistent evidence and that the journalist was mistreated behind bars. 

CPJ’s calls and messages to Ousseynou Ly, spokesman for the Senegalese presidency went unanswered.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

As Trump-Musk take a hatchet to American higher education, I marvel at the thought that there are hundreds if not thousands of Curtins (maybe not as good) across the vast US, most at small liberal arts colleges, all in love with words and wisdom, all teaching their students lovingly, urging them to THINK. That is surely the beauty of America, the promise to take the world’s poor and reviled and give them the chance to be someone, do something worthwhile.

Curtin, from his earliest memories, saw that conventional life was a provocation because it hid more than it revealed; that it harbored secrets that could not be exposed or else the make-believe nature of normal life would collapse like a cardboard set. Like everyone, I was ushered onto this Shakespearean stage and have acted out many roles assigned to me, but always with the inner consciousness that something was amiss. Everyone seemed to be playing someone, but who was the player? Is the role playing us? Are we marionettes in some pipe dream, and is there an author behind it? God? The devil? Capitalism?

Curtin’s postmodern credo comes from Thoreau: We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking. There are no neutral observers.

His goal: to oppose these scoundrels and their ilk who kill and wage endless wars against innocents around the world, in a way that will delight and last a little while.

Writing as music

Curtin admits he is obsessed with words. That they play him. He, in turn, uses them to produce both astute political analyses and art in luminescent words and sentences that pulsate. I think of them as intertwined lovers. AI is taking capitalism to its Faustian apotheosis, to mechanize us all, to eliminate passion and will. Reduce thought to dead words. Curtin compares his writing to composing, hoping to leave a fresh song in your heart, something to help you see the pageant of our lives in more than just dead words.

In The End of the Speed Limit on the Highway to Nowhere, he compares us to Sisyphus but without the illusion of ascent, merely going in a circle, returning to the same grey reality of the freedom-to-choose-what-is-always-the-same, seen as a mediated, rootless reality that is no reality at all. Yes, you can fly anywhere in the world (if you are part of SWIFT), but you will find the same McDonald’s and box stores, more or less the same sandy beaches, and souvenirs made in China. Fake diversity. Fake news, to quote our fake king-of-the-world.

We are flooded with unneeded techno ‘miracles’, but without roots we are swept away by them, our mediated reality providing no signposts for where we are headed, no warnings of pitfalls that threaten our real Reality and us, allowing us to pause, to take a stand. Root in Latin is radix, i.e., radical, which today means extreme, as if we unconsciously mold our thinking to beware of rootedness in our rootless world, where having roots is suspect, even reactionary. We celebrated rootlessness, the dream of travel, and escape as the best experience. How many of us live/die where we were born?

How language betrays us! Betray as in reveal and subvert. Curtin calls himself a contrarian and relishes contronyms (e.g., betray, fast, sanction, wear, weather, wind up). I’m big on antonyms that our mediated reality turns into identities, e.g., war = peace, progress = regress, bad = good. We see how language reveals much about our muddled thinking, storing clues from the past, and warning us of our illusions.

Guy Debord begins The Society of the Spectacle with a tongue-in-cheek parody of Marx’s opening of Kapital: In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Like Marx’s commodities, spectacles are ‘use values’, but even more removed from the consumer than bubble gum or a sports car, as they happen only in your mind, illusion pure and simple, reality so artfully mediated that you pay your money, enjoy, and blissfully forget and move on to the next instalment.

No Virgil to guide us

Today’s ‘great reset’ just may succeed because we have lost the most important roots, our spirituality, buried beneath a heap of commodity-spectacles. Walking through the forest to the genuinely spectacular Taughannock Falls, Curtin gloomily ponders the massacre of Iroquois two centuries ago and asks: Is there any place on this blood-soaked earth where a semi-conscious person can rest easy?

He sees our descent into our current Hell/abyss as starting with Reagan, enshrining illusion in the White House, his assigning communism to the trash heap of history, his attack on social welfare, and his ignorance of the environment. All the presidents since have been variations on his MAGA—even Clinton and Obama credit Reagan as their inspiration. Reagan certainly helped collapse the Soviet Union, but he turned the US into a one-party state, taking his lead from the moribund communists.

And we accept it, as we are trapped in a simulacrum reality, a closed system, a solipsism.

We have no Virgil to guide us through Hell and set us on the road to enlightenment. Wait! We have AI to do that for us. Our worship of the machine is such that as the machine ‘matures’, we have let it take our place, to think for us, even to simulate emotions, speaking as if emoting. The Turing test. The machine’s goal is Darwinian, too: survival of the fittest. Unless we rediscover the miracle of life, root ourselves in a genuine experience of Reality, take back control from the machine, and even ban or dismantle it where it is harmful.

Curtin is a postmodernist, drawing inspiration from the French Debord and Baudrillard. And looks to Joyce for a way forward. In The Contronymal Cage, he quotes Joyce on the language of Joyce’s English-born Jesuit dean of studies, who speaks a different English from that of the Irish rebel. We must take control of our language, be conscious of where it came from, its roots, and how it is used to keep us trapped now in a simulacrum hyperreality, as language constitutes reality as much as it describes it.

Red pill time

There is no ‘heppi end’ to the stories we weave (or rather that weave us) in the Matrix. Poetry is an escape route, unashamedly subjective, rebellious, and questioning. Another way is the essay, as Curtin knows well, and Edward Said, who argued that his nation, Palestine, is a narrative; that we must tell our stories of distorted reality and oppression to escape the Matrix and root ourselves in unmediated Reality. Throw off Blake’s ‘mind-forged manacles’. Recognize that life is not a dead mechanism but is conscious, that we are part of a conscious universe, not as Sisyphus repeating his tortured, pointless circle of unreality, but as Dante, guided in his spiritual quest by the great minds of the past, teaching us to distinguish the devil from God.

What about virtual reality? It sounds ominous, blurring the line between reality and fantasy, but not if we are aware. That goes for all techno miracles. And I for one would much prefer to take a virtual reality trip to visit Mecca in the 7th c than to squash Nature with a huge carbon footprint just to say ‘Kilroy was here’ in a dystopian 21st c Mecca. We can use technology wisely, even reject it if it destroys Nature, undermines society, and kills my soul.

Though raised a Christian, and admiring Jesus, King, Romero, and all those who have died trying to make peace and justice a reality, Curtin is a secular humanist, not looking to traditional religions for answers to ‘why?’ today. He bemoans our loss of spirituality but doesn’t urge Christians to revive their faith, as I suspect he sees it threadbare. That’s where I point my finger. We need faith! That vacuum in my life led me to Islam as the only faith that is still alive, meaningful in a meaningless late capitalism.

Islam was supposedly backward compared to the progressive West. But looking back now, I would suggest we would be much better off if the age of technology had arrived much more slowly, with a spiritual quest still the goal. The West lost its ailing Catholic spirituality with the Protestant Reformation, as it embraced capitalism and became a false spirituality, a materialism masquerading as spirituality, a treacherous inversion of our most fundamental, radical truth. Islam is slowly breaking its shackles, inflicted by the ‘progressive’ capitalist imperialist countries, which occupied Muslim lands, did the usual rape-and-pillage, and even attempted to erase millions of Muslims in Palestine, stealing their land, their spiritual heritage, which is rooted in the Real. Islam does not need Debord or Baudrillard to tell us that our reality is an illusion, that the ‘modern’ world has lost its soul, that the truth lies in the ‘backward’ world, the precapitalist, spirit-based civilizations. Islam’s immunity to ‘progress’ is its saving grace, as it answers our need for meaning in life, which is timeless, technologyless.

Beware the counterinitiations

René Guénon is the 20th-century thinker who first deconstructed the embrace of modernism in The Crisis of the Modern World (1927). He converted to Islam in the 1930s and embraced a traditional lifestyle, rejecting for the most part the illusory technology of the 20th century for ‘spiritual technologies’, even as our capitalist/ socialist societies pushed ahead to carry out greater and greater monstrosities. We have lost our highest faculty, intellectual intuition, i.e., direct apperception or gnosis. We have lost the very possibility of spiritual realization. The Soviet secular spirituality was the first to collapse, and Russia has returned to its Christian Orthodoxy roots, i.e., there is an exit ramp ‘back to the future’.

Gueon coined the term ‘counterinitiation’, movements that are spiritual doppelgangers that mimic authentic spirituality. Protestantism’s embrace of capitalism is the greatest such ruse, which explains the thousands of evangelical sects all claiming to be true. Now you can fashion your own spirituality with a dash of tarot, yoga, and mindfulness. No! We must rediscover the wisdom of traditional religions, which have been discarded on our highway to nowhere. We need a great cosmic reset. Curtin sees himself as a contrarian, infatuated with contronyms. Language is a powerful repository of wisdom, embedded in great literature, especially poetry. But he doesn’t go the extra mile.

Without a love, not just of words, but of spirituality, sacred words, essays like Curtin’s just depress me. In Hindu lore, we are in the declining period of civilization, known as the Kali Yuga (the Age of Darkness). It began with the rise of agriculture in 3000 BC, which unmoored us from our spiritual roots, embracing money, private property, and slavery. Three thousand years is a long nightmare, but it is also the necessary precursor to renewal, the cosmic reset.

The Arts (I like to use caps for the ‘Real thing’) is our avenue for spiritual truths. Our screeds help us see the world in 4d (virtual reality a gimmicky version of this serious path), connect us with our Real environment, not the phony mediated environment of consumer capitalism. As for sacred vs profane, no, no! Everything is sacred, alive, to be connected with meaningfully, loved/hated. There is no neutral observer. I write with passion, or my writing is dead. And as for mindless rituals. No, no! The ritual of prayer is an active form of knowledge, a path to participate in eternal truths, our metaphysical roadmap, showing us the exit ramp from our highway to know-where. (Don’t you love language?)

JFK and 9/11 litmus tests

Curtin includes a long article about JFK. The Life and Public Assassination of John F Kennedy, one on JFK and Dulles, and The Assassination and Mrs. Paine. His great courage in the face of an assassination he expected can inspire us to oppose the systemic forces of evil that control the United States and are leading the world into the abyss. And one on Bob Dylan (‘our Emerson’) and his 2020 song about the assassination Murder Most Foul (thank you, Hamlet), whose lyrics about the conspiracy are ignored or mocked by our doppelganger media. Neither Dylan nor Walberg is going ‘gentle into that good night’, to quote Bob’s model and namesake Dylan Thomas.

I like Curtin sharing personal experiences. There aren’t any independent, neutral observers or observations. He’s not dogmatic. A 9/11 essay at the Berkshire Edge (not included, a shame as the litmus test these days is where you stand on that elephant-in-the-room) dismisses the official story, assumes a conspiracy of the elite directed by the CIA. As for charges of Israel and Mossad, he’s skeptical both here and on JFK, arguing the CIA is too powerful to let that happen ‘outside the box’. I would point to many instances from the King David Hotel in 1948 to many, many assassinations of Palestinian — any — leaders it doesn’t like (Arafat and hundreds of guerrilla leaders). There is an unspoken hit list always in the creation, much like Ukraine’s Myrotvorets. No group, official or unofficial, comes near to Israel. Bin Laden, eat your heart out.

Personally (remember, no neutral writers!), I think only Israeli terrorists are cynical and smart enough to do such a thing, using Saudi youth as patsies. Funny, Jews have been the world’s leading terrorists since Israel was created, and are exonerated, pointing the finger at the Muslim victims, defending themselves as the real terrorists. Curtin’s mild dissidence/apostasy went unpunished, except for a few comments ridiculing him as another conspiracy nut. I suspect he would have been treated much more severely if he had labeled Israelis, i.e., secular Jewish fanatics, as the perpetrators of JFK’s murder and/or 9/11.

My sense is that Americans are too spooked, too afraid to point the finger at Israel as the villain-in-chief in the world today, largely responsible for our descent into Hell. US-Israel is tattooed on American minds. A spiritual mark of Cain in our dystopia, making sure we are ready for the mental gas chamber. Are tattoos removable? It’s very hard, painful, and leaves a scar. But, hey!, purging yourself of society’s inhumanity is worth it. Down with tattoos! They are haram in Islam with good reason. Our only identity needed to live a good life is identifying with God, trying to perfect ourselves, and getting as close to Him (not ‘him’) as possible. The world and our special place in it are the only proof we need of who we are and where we’re going.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eric Walberg.

In late 2024, CPJ’s review of court documents and interviews with Bassène, his co-accused, and witnesses found that the investigation into the journalist was severely flawed. Several who were subsequently acquitted told CPJ that they were forced to implicate the journalist or sign inaccurate interview records. CPJ also found that the investigation relied on inconsistent evidence regarding Bassène’s whereabouts on the day of the killings and reasons to doubt the authenticity of emails purportedly sent by him. Bassène said he was mistreated in custody; medical documents describe an injury to his ear as a result of “trauma.”

According to Sané, secretary of the southern Senegalese village of Toubacouta in Casamance’s main city of Ziguinchor, the only time he had ever spoken to Bassène was when Bassène called him on the day of the massacre to ask for information about the killings. At the time, Bassène was close to finishing his fourth book on the conflict between Senegalese government forces and the separatist Movement of Democratic Forces of Casamance (MFDC). One appeal court upheld his sentence in 2024; a second appeal against his conviction is currently with Senegal’s Supreme Court.

CPJ’s investigation also found new information linking Bassène’s imprisonment to his work, with court documents showing that prosecutors cited Bassène’s reporting activities, including phone calls and emails, before and after the killings in arguments for his conviction. These details led to his inclusion as the only Senegalese journalist in CPJ’s 2024 census of media members jailed around the world. Senegal, which elected a new reform-promising president and parliament in 2024, was listed among the top five jailers of journalists in Africa in CPJ’s 2023 census.

Threatened for his work

Bassène had dedicated most of his 20-year career to covering the conflict between the Senegalese government and the MFDC, which has sought an independent territory in Casamance since 1982. His interest began in college, when he wrote a thesis on people displaced by the fighting. He published his first book in 2013 on the late rebel leader Abbé Augustin Diamacoune Senghor. Bassène planned on calling his fourth book “A Conflict that Feeds More than it Kills,” and it would have detailed how certain people profited from the fighting, including local leaders, peace-negotiating NGOs, and the traffickers of illegal timber. Bassène had a reputation for dogged reporting, covering all sides of the conflict and traveling to rebel-held areas for his research. “My principle has always been to go and get information from the source,” he told CPJ in one of several phone interviews from prison between September to December 2024.

“It was a rather explosive book in which he mentioned organizations by name and evoked the problem of wood cutting,” Xavier Diatta, a friend of Bassène, told CPJ.

Bassène knew that his reporting came with risks. In the foreword to his third book, published in January 2017, he recalled receiving threats from fighters on both sides and being labeled by critics “as a rebel, or as a spy in the pay of the State of Senegal or the MFDC.”  Bassene’s wife, Odette Victorine Coly, told CPJ, “he was no longer taking calls from numbers he didn’t know because he was receiving so many threats.” In September 2017, Bassène told Diatta in a message reviewed by CPJ, “I am finishing my research by May [2018] to end my work on the crisis and focus on my family because I am also being threatened.”

Bassène wasn’t the only journalist under scrutiny for covering the rebel movement. In 2005, authorities arrested the entire staff of the private radio station Sud FM in the capital, Dakar, and detained its correspondent Ibrahima Gassama in Ziguinchor for interviewing the rebel leader of an MFDC faction. Other journalists have also been expelled or intimidated for reporting on a conflict that has killed thousands of people and remains a sensitive issue in Senegal.

Violence in the forest

By the end of 2017, Bassène had begun to worry about the risk of increased violence associated with illegal logging in the forest, which both authorities and rebels had profited from over the years. A local faction of the MFDC had promised to “take care of protecting Casamance’s natural resources,” accusing the Senegalese authorities of encouraging the “squandering” of the forest. The group’s armed wing “Atika,” meanwhile, said it would “crack down on any woodcutter who ventures into the Boffa Bayotte forest.” The statements followed the arrest in November 2017 by Senegalese authorities of four residents of Toubacouta, who were members of an independent inter-village committee for the protection of the forest, following an altercation with illegal loggers.

“[The MFDC] statements were becoming more and more threatening,” Bassène told CPJ, adding that armed men often attacked loggers in the forest and that 10 people were killed in 2011.

Before the massacre, Bassène shared his concern that violence in the forest could escalate with several people close to the government, including Diatta, an adviser to the late Senegalese prime minister Mahammed Boun Abdallah Dionne, Bachir Ba, then regional director of national public broadcaster RTS, and Jean-Marie François Biagui, a former MFDC secretary general turned civilian who remained active in Senegalese politics, the three told CPJ in interviews. Diatta said that he informed the gendarmerie about Bassène’s warnings when he was held over his links to the journalist and questioned for three days following the killings. But Bassène’s efforts are not mentioned in court documents.

Bassène has remained behind bars since his 2018 arrest by masked gendarmes, who scaled the walls of his home. Virtually all of the 25 other co-accused have been acquitted. CPJ traveled nearly 500 kilometers (310 miles) south from Senegal’s capital, Dakar, to villages in the area, including Toubacouta and Bourofaye Diola, to speak to some of the defendants and others close to the case. Seven of the co-accused told CPJ that while the prosecution presented them as his accomplices, they were interrogated under duress and authorities attributed false testimonies to them.

Alleged meetings

During the trial, the prosecution alleged that Bassène planned the killings, accusing him of involvement in two meetings with villagers and village representatives held on December 22, 2017, and January 3, 2018. At these meetings, authorities alleged that Bassène promised that he would “manage” the forest problem by calling on the rebels to defend the forest. A third meeting was also allegedly held in Bassène’s absence on January 5, 2018, during which the massacre was said to have been coordinated according to his plans. But nine of the alleged participants in these meetings told CPJ that they were unaware of any such gatherings and had never heard Bassène say such things.

Those people – Maurice Badji, an uncle of Bassène and chief of the village of Bourofaye Diola, Ibou Sané, Abdou Sané, Jean Christophe Diatta, Abdoulaye Diédhiou, Abdou Karim Sagna, Alassane Badji, Alphousseyni Badji, Dou Sagna – also told CPJ they had been forced by the authorities to sign transcripts of interviews with them that had been altered to include inaccurate information. All but three – Maurice Badji, Dou Sagna, and Abdou Sané – said they had never met Bassène. According to the court documents, four additional defendants – Papya Sané, Nfally Diémé, Cheikh Oumar Diédhiou, and Lansana Badji – said that they never participated in the alleged meetings.

Another defendant, Jean Baptiste Badji, said in an interrogation he had heard Bassène at one of the meetings saying that “blood is going to flow,” but retracted his testimony in court. Jean Baptiste Badji died after the trial. “In prison, when I asked Jean why he said those false things, he cried and said he was afraid, and gendarmes brutalized him,” Dou Sagna told CPJ.

Conflicting evidence

According to court documents, the gendarmerie claimed Bassène’s phone was geolocated in the Boffa Bayotte forest, alongside the phones belonging to several of his co-defendants. But CPJ spoke to four people who said they were with Bassène in the Kandialang neighborhood of Ziguinchor at the time of the killings. Coly, Bassène’s wife, and two others from the area who asked not to be named for safety reasons confirmed that they had seen Bassène and spoken with him on the afternoon of January 6, 2018, which is when the massacre is said to have occurred. Alain Diédhiou, the journalist’s neighbor, told CPJ he was with Bassène at a local football game at that time.

Bassène told CPJ that he learned about the tragedy on the radio while he was at the football field with Diédhiou and then had several phone calls with MFDC members to try to find out what happened. Those calls would later be used to support accusations that he planned and instigated the killings.

‘Incriminating’ phone calls

The journalist told CPJ that he began researching the murders by making phone calls the moment he learned about it. “An event of this magnitude could not fail to feature in this book, especially as I had been following the case before the massacre,” he told CPJ. One call was to César Atoute Badiate, the leader of the local MFDC faction, who was sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment for complicity with Bassène. “I asked him if his men were involved and apparently he didn’t know about it yet, he had promised to come back to me,” Bassène said. The prosecution also cited Bassène’s call after the killings with Oumar Ampoi Bodian, an MFDC representative who was convicted for complicity in the murders and then acquitted on appeal in August 2024. Bodian told CPJ that he had called the journalist, assuming Bassène would be on the ground investigating.

According to the prosecution, these calls were made as part of Bassène’s participation in the killings, but transcripts of the calls were never produced in court despite the requests of the journalist’s legal team.

False testimony under duress

Court documents from the trial reveal a striking pattern: defendants in the case repeatedly and vigorously contested statements attributed to them in the minutes of their interrogations and insisted they had “made confessions” after being subjected to “acts of torture” without the presence of a lawyer. In addition to Sané, who was interrogated at gunpoint, at least four other defendants in the case told CPJ they were violently interrogated about Bassène’s alleged involvement in the killings, and that false testimony attributed to them about Bassène was later introduced in the trial.

Abdou Karim Sagna, a resident of Toubacouta and one of Bassène’s main co-defendants who was described as the executor of the killings and later acquitted, told CPJ he did not know Bassène before his detention. Sagna described his arrest and the search of his home, which was carried out in the middle of the night by armed and masked gendarmes. He also said officers asked him about Bassène and the case as they slapped and hit him, subjected him to humiliating verbal and physical harassment, and shocked him with an electric baton. “We were called one by one only to be forced to sign and then referred to the prosecutor’s office without knowing the content of the interrogation minutes,” Sagna said.

Jean Christophe, another defendant, told CPJ that he was punched and subjected to other mistreatment while officers asked him if he was in the forest with Bassène on the day of the killings. He said he told the officers that he did not know Bassène, but his testimony had been changed when presented during the trial. Two others, brothers Alassane and Alphousseyni Badji, told CPJ that authorities also violently interrogated them and misrepresented their testimony in court.

Brutal interrogations

Bassène also faced brutal treatment, he told CPJ. After his arrest, gendarmes delayed his interrogation for four days, claiming he was “still lucid” or not sufficiently exhausted to divulge keyinformation during questioning. Bassène was held naked, handcuffed at his feet and hands for those four days, Yama Diédhiou, another suspect in the case, who saw the journalist in detention, told CPJ.

When the interrogation finally began, the blows came swift and fast. “They beat me constantly, stripped me naked and applied an electric baton to my genitals when they didn’t like my answers,” Bassène said. “When they paused the interrogation during the night, a gendarme made sure…that I was not sleeping by knocking on the door every time I dozed off.” Both Diédhiou and Omar Sané, arrested in a separate case and held with Bassène, said that instead of a jail cell, the journalist was kept in a toilet stall with no light, infested with mosquitos and other insects.

Bassène said that when he refused to “sign an autograph” on the minutes of the investigation, one of the gendarmes slapped him, causing his right ear to bleed. After complaining of pain and hearing loss, Bassène was seen by a doctor in 2019 and treated for “perforation of the right eardrum following a trauma,” according to medical documents reviewed by CPJ. Those documents also confirm the loss of hearing in his right ear and severe deterioration in eyesight, which Bassène says was due to the tight bandage that was forced over his face for nearly a day after his arrest. Bassène also said he was denied access to a lawyer during the interrogation, though he obtained one later in court.

In December 2024, CPJ submitted a letter to the Senegalese gendarmerie requesting comment on the conditions of Bassène’s interrogation, but did not receive a response. In January 2025, gendarmes called Bassène’s wife in order to interview her on the allegations of torture, she told CPJ.

Questionable emails

As part of its case, the prosecution also alleged that Bassène was a member of the MFDC communications team and sent about 21 emails in that capacity to Ousmane Tamba, an exiled member of MFDC’s political wing who owns the news website Journal du Pays and is close to MFDC leader Badiate.

Bassène told CPJ that his last email discussion with Tamba was when he was writing his second book, published in 2015, documenting the origin of the conflict. Tamba declined to respond to CPJ’s written request for comment, sent via Bodian, the MFDC’s representative, saying in November 2024 that he was “not involved in any way” in the case.

In one of the emails in the court file, it appeared that Bassène had identified himself as part of the MFDC’s team in written responses to questions from Journal du Pays about the conflict, which were dated December 4, 2017. CPJ, using the digital archiving tool Wayback Machine, found that the interview was published at least three months earlier and cited Bassène as a journalist, writer, and observer of the conflict.

Journal du Pays told CPJ via its official email address in 2018 that Bassène was an experienced journalist and specialist on the Casamance conflict who gave “dozens of interviews” to their outlet.

Bassène denied sending the emails and being a member of the MFDC communications team. In court, Bassène’s legal team also questioned the authenticity of an email that was addressed only to “@/” and another allegedly sent in February 2018, a month after Bassène was detained without access to phone or email.

Ciré Clédor Ly, one of Bassène’s lawyers in the case said in an interview with local media that Bassène – who was forced to give authorities access to his email account – repeatedly requested an expert opinion on whether the messages had come directly from his account. The court refused.

In the Ziguinchor prison, where he spends his days reading, writing, and assisting the nurses to care for other inmates, Bassène waits for his appeal to the Supreme Court to be considered.

“I’m ready to spend my life in prison, but what I can’t stand is the injustice of being told that I wasn’t arrested because of my work as a journalist,” he said.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Moussa Ngom.

Barangay New Zealand’s Rene Molina has interviewed the country’s first Filipino Green MP Francisco Hernandez who was sworn into Parliament yesterday as the party’s latest member.

This is the first interview with Hernandez who replaces former Green Party co-leader James Shaw after his retirement from politics to take up a green investment advisory role.

Hernandez talks about his earlier role as a climate change activist and his role with New Zealand’s Climate Commission, and his life experiences.

• READ MORE: Francisco Hernandez Green Party profile

The interviewer — educator, digital media producer and community advocate Rene Nonoy Molina — is also a member of the Asia Pacific Media Network (APMN).

“I was involved in the New Zealand climate crisis movement as an activist,” Hernandez says.

“I was involved in a group called Generation Zero, which is the youth climate justice group and that’s how I ended up getting involved in the New Zealand youth delegation that went to Paris.

“So that’s separate from my Climate Change Commission work which came after.”

Hernandez is the son of a member of Joseph Estrada’s ruling party in the Philippines before its government changed in 2001, according to the Otago University magazine.

He migrated to New Zealand with his family when he was 12 and is a former president of the Otago University Students’ Association with an honours degree in politics.

Francisco B. Hernandez talks to Rene Molina.    Video: Barangay NZ

He has also worked as an advisor at the Climate Commission, reports RNZ News.

He stood for Dunedin in the last election, coming third with more than 8000 votes — not far behind National’s Michael Woodhouse (over 9000) but far behind the more than 17,000 votes of Labour’s Rachel Brooking.

Published in collaboration with Barangay New Zealand.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.