Wikipedia
Azamn is an independent Arabic newspaper in the Sultanate of Oman on the Arabian peninsula. It was closed by the Omani government on August 9, 2016 following a report about senior Omani officials pressuring the country's judiciary to overturn a decision in an inheritance case.
The closure came after three journalists from the newspaper were arrested in the days following the publication of an article entitled "Supreme Bodies Tie the Hands of Justice." That article accused Ishaq Bin Ahmed Al Bousaidi, the chairman of the country's Judicial Council and chief magistrate of Oman's Supreme Court of intervening in inheritance cases before the courts at the behest of senior government officials.
On July 28, 2016, Azamn's editor-in-chief, Ibrahim al–Maamari, was called in for questioning by security officials and imprisoned. Oman's Information Ministry then warned the newspaper that if it continued to report on the issue it would be closed, according to Amnesty International. In protest of the order, Azamn left a portion of its front page blank for several days.
On Aug. 3, Zaher al-Abri, another editor at the newspaper, was taken into custody in the capital Muscat. Al-Abri's detention came one day after he had spoken to a representative of the New York-based press freedom group Committee to Protect Journalists for an article about al-Maamari's arrest.
Al-Abri's arrest did not end the conflict between the newspaper and the government. On Aug. 9, Azamn published an interview with Ali bin Salem al-No’mani, the vice president of Oman's Supreme Court, in which he was quoted praising the newspaper's reporting on the lack of independence in Oman's judiciary and praising al-Maamari. "He [al-Maamari] spoke honestly and sincerely in his publication, and now as an administrator in the judiciary I do not know his whereabouts," al-No’mani was quoted as saying, according to Human Rights Watch.
Within hours of the report's publication, the newspaper was ordered closed and a news reported quoted an unnamed employee saying the publication was not given a clear reason for the closure or a time frame for when it might resume publication. That day, Omani security forces also arrested Yousif al-Haj, a deputy editor of the newspaper who had conducted the interviews with al-No'mani.
The newspaper's homepage also stopped operating and was replaced with an image of the three detained Azamn journalists.
The state-run Oman News Agency later published a statement criticizing a "local newspaper" without naming Azamn. "The report did not only ignore the basics of freedom of expression, but it also degraded it by utilising it in such a manner that harms one of the pillars of the state — the justice institution," it said. "The institution should be respected rather than be targeted with deliberate accusations meant to shake confidence, as was intended by the said newspaper in its recent series of articles and interviews."
The closure and arrest of the three journalists has drawn criticism from rights groups including Human Rights Watch, the Committee to Protect Journalists and Amnesty International. "Hauling journalists off to prison for alleging authorities’ potential abuse of power completely undermines Oman’s claims to respect free expression,” said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch, in a statement.
Azamn editor-in-chief al-Maamari was previously arrested in 2011 during the Arab Spring and sentenced to five months in prison. Azamn was also banned for publishing for one month for publishing an article that was considered an insult to the officials at the Ministry of Justice.