Cameroon on Wednesday provisionally released an activist imprisoned after he posted videos on TikTok urging democratic change ahead of next year’s presidential elections, his lawyer said.
Hairdresser and social media activist Junior Ngombe, 23, was arrested outside his shop in the western city of Douala on Wednesday last week by three plainclothes men claiming to be intelligence officers, Human Rights Watch said.
“Ngombe was granted bail under a guarantor’s undertaking at the Yaounde military court, where he was on trial,” his lawyer Serge Emmanuel Chendjou said. “It is a provisional release granted by the government commissioner at the military court.”
Photo: AFP
Ngombe’s arrest prompted an outcry over what international human rights groups call a growing crackdown on freedom of expression under 91-year-old Cameroonian President Paul Biya, who has been in power for 42 years.
Ngombe’s lawyers said he had been charged with “incitement to rebellion” and “propagation of false information,” which they believe to be linked to videos he posted on social media.
In his posts on TikTok, Ngombe encouraged people to vote in the presidential election and challenged the Cameroonian authorities’ crackdown on dissent.
“In 2025, either we win, or we lose everything,” he said, urging authorities to “let the youth express themselves” in the Central African country.
Since his arrest, civil society and opposition figures had clamored for his release, using the hashtag #FreeJuniorNgombe on social media.
Biya and his government are regularly accused by international human rights organizations of repressing all opposition. The long-serving president was re-elected in 2018 to his seventh term after a contested vote that sparked a wave of political repression.
As Paris hosts the Summer Olympics, undocumented Chinese sex worker Hua says increased police patrols are threatening her livelihood. “I really feel under pressure, I’m constantly scared. Every day, there are police checks,” the 55-year-old said, using a different name so as not to be recognized. “So I go out less and less to work.” About 40,000 people — the overwhelming majority women — sell or are exploited for sex in France, according to government and charity estimates. Under French law, selling sex is allowed, but it is illegal to exploit someone or pay for sex, placing the criminal responsibility on pimps and
The WHO yesterday announced a new project to accelerate the development in poorer nations of vaccines for human avian influenza infections using cutting-edge messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) technology. The WHO said Argentine manufacturer Sinergium Biotech would lead the effort and had already begun developing candidate H5N1 vaccines. Bird flu H5N1 first emerged in 1996, but since 2020 an exponential growth in outbreaks in birds has occurred in parallel with the virus increasingly jumping to mammals, including cattle in US farms and a few humans. This has prompted fears the virus could spark a future pandemic. Sinergium is aiming to establish proof-of-concept in preclinical models
PRESIDENTIAL RACE: Harris repeated her popular line that as a former prosecutor going up against predators and fraudsters, she knows ‘Donald Trump’s type’ well US Vice President and presidential hopeful Kamala Harris launched a searing attack on former US president Donald Trump on Tuesday, telling her biggest campaign rally yet that the momentum was shifting in the White House race and daring the Republican to debate her face to face. Harris’ trip to Atlanta, Georgia, came as re-energized Democrats regard the swing state as being in play again, after it looked beyond hope under US President Joe Biden before his shock withdrawal from the November election. The presumptive Democratic nominee is aiming to expand the party’s battleground map and appeal to young black voters, delivering a
Images of Olympic table tennis players from North Korea and South Korea taking a selfie together on the medal podium in Paris went viral in South Korea yesterday, hailed as a rare show of cross-border unity. Nuclear-armed North Korea declared the South its principal enemy earlier this year and tensions between the two countries are at one of their highest points in years. However, after South Korea won bronze and North Korea silver in the mixed doubles behind China, South Korea’s Lim Jong-hoon took a group photo after the medal ceremony. North Korea’s Ri Jong-sik and Kim Kum-yong, the South’s Shin Yu-bin and