`Free Speech` in Gambia

**Oresai** · 01-01-2009, 08:16 AM

(Yes, sorry, that was sarcasm...)

source, Scotsman online.

Missionaries given hard labour in Gambia

Pleaded guilty to sedition: Dave Fulton and his wife Fiona (holding their adopted daughter Elizabeth), daughter Iona and son Luke. Picture: PA

Published Date: 31 December 2008
By Jenny Haworth
A SCOTTISH missionary and his wife have been sentenced to a year of hard labour in a Gambian prison for criticising the country's president.

David and Fiona Fulton pleaded guilty last week to charges of sedition, and asked the court for a lenient sentence.

Mr Fulton, from Troon in Ayrshire, and his wife – who have a two-year-old adopted daughter and two older children – were also fined £6,250 each and will be deported to the UK after serving their sentences.

The Fultons had been charged with sedition for writing letters to organisations and individuals abroad to "bring into hatred or contempt, to excite disaffection against the president of the republic and the government of Gambia".

Delivering his judgment, the principal magistrate, Edrissa Mbai, quoted from an e-mail sent by the couple in September, entitled "Hell In the Gambia", in which the country was said to be "sinking fast into a morass of Islam". The magistrate did not give details of who the e-mails were sent to.

Mainland Africa's smallest country, Gambia is constitutionally secular, but 90 per cent of its population is Muslim. Yahya Jammeh, the president, has tolerated little dissent since he seized power in a military coup in 1994.

The Christian couple were arrested in late November and have already spent a month behind bars.

Their young daughter is being cared for by friends in Gambia, while their older children are in the UK. They have worked as missionaries in Gambia for almost a decade.

Mr Mbai said the couple had shown no respect for Gambian authority or for the country's president.

"In this country there is a law that one has to obey, whether Gambian or non-Gambian," the judge said in the packed courtroom in the capital, Banjul, where friends of the couple broke into tears.

The Fultons had originally maintained their innocence, but changed their plea at a hearing last week in which Mr Fulton apologised to the Gambian public and to the president. Defence lawyer Antoumane Gaye told the court his clients had been working to help Gambia for years, and asked that they be spared a jail sentence.

A spokesman for the Foreign Office said it was seeking clarity as to the definition of hard labour. He added: "It is a decision for the Fultons with their legal representative as to whether they appeal this judgment or not."

Mr Fulton, 60, and Mrs Fulton, 46, originally from Torquay, Devon, were not granted bail.