The National Press Council, CNP, the Ivoirian press regulatory body, has suspended for three editions Le Temps newspaper, an opposition daily (pro-Gbagbo) for publishing a call to boycott the October 25th presidential election.
According to the MFWA correspondent in Cote d’Ivoire, the suspension was announced on October 22nd, 2015.
The CNP accuses the newspaper of publishing a quarter page notice on the front page of its 21st October edition, in which a former speaker of parliament, Mamadou Koulibaly is quoted thus: “the time has come; let’s dare say no to fraudulent elections.”
Cleared by the Constitutional Council alongside nine other candidates for the election, Mamadou Koulibaly withdrew from the presidential race on October 8th, a day before the official opening of electoral campaigns.
“This electoral notice amounts to a call to boycott the presidential election of October 25th, decried the CNP which saw it as tending to undermine “social cohesion and public order”.
Meanwhile, the Managing Editor of the paper, Yacouba Gbané has denounced the decision as an act of “harassment” albeit not surprising because we “have always been aimed at by the CNP.”
