Tunisia has refused entry to the chief of press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) on Thursday when he arrived for a UN summit at which journalists have been harassed, the Paris-based organisation said.
"I wasn't even able to get off the plane," RSF Secretary-General Robert Ménard said. "Just after the plane stopped, I was told to remain seated and to wait until everyone had disembarked. At that point, a policeman, who must have been a Tunisian policeman, came and told me that I wasn't allowed on Tunisian territory. He explained to me that I did not have authorisation to take part in the summit."
A RSF statement condemned the incident saying, "We are staggered by the complicity of the organisers of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) and to some extent, France, which did nothing to ensure his attendance at this international summit. From being a masquerade, the WSIS has turned into a scandal."
As Ménard was prevented from leaving the plane, another police officer filmed the incident without permission from the Air France crew. Ménard told police that it was untrue he did not have accreditation, his UN accreditation number was 10 30 191. He received no further explanation from police officers at the door of the plane and on the tarmac. The plane’s captain told him to stay on board and issued him a return ticket on the same aircraft. No WSIS organiser nor any representative of the French embassy had been present to receive him in Tunis.
The WSIS executive director, Charles Geiger, had said in a statement on November 16 that Robert Ménard was not welcome at the summit, although his office had given him accreditation. He referred to a claim made by the Tunisian authorities that an official complaint had been laid against Ménard in Tunisia. Geiger admitted that he had not confirmed the existence of the complaint. Moreover, the president of the Tunisian bar told RSF's lawyer that he was unaware of any such complaint.
On November 17, RSF activists stuck a giant poster representing the "black holes in the web" inside the building hosting the WSIS. Members of the organisation stuck a 2x3-metre poster on the floor of the exhibition pavilion among stands set up for the countries taking part in the summit. It illustrated the 15 �enemies of the Internet’ � the countries that trample on free expression on the Net. In these "black holes on the web", sites are censored, draconian filtering systems set up and cyberdissidents and Internet-users harassed and imprisoned, the RSF statement said.
