Amnesty International has accused South Sudan’s National Security Service (NSS) of using abusive surveillance to terrorise journalists, activists and critics.
In a report, These Walls Have Ears – The Chilling Effect of Surveillance in South Sudan’, AI noted reports that telecommunication and surveillance companies enable the interception of phone calls without adequate legal safeguards.
The human rights organisation said it discovered documents that show an Israeli company, Verint Systems Ltd, supplied communications interception technology to the South Sudanese government at least between 2015 and 2017.
‘Unchecked and unlawful surveillance by the NSS is having a chilling effect on civil society and peaceful activism’, AI’s Director for East and Southern Africa, Deprose Muchena, said in a statement.
‘The threat of surveillance is a weapon in itself – government critics and human rights activists told us they live in constant fear of being spied on’.
South Sudan is a dangerous place to be a journalist, according to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan.
According to the AI report, the government, primarily through the NSS, uses intimidation, harassment, arbitrary arrests, prolonged detention, torture, and other ill-treatment, enforced disappearances and extra-judicial killings to silence government critics, human rights activists and journalists.
The rights organisation said it carried out a two-year investigation, with 63 people, including South Sudanese activists, journalists and lawyers sharing their experiences and knowledge of physical and communications surveillance in the country.
The organisation said it also reviewed over 57 reports and studies by UN bodies, intergovernmental, non-governmental organisations, as well as resolutions, laws and conventions.
‘Most activists said that the surveillance, harassment and looming risk of arbitrary arrest, detention and possible death does not stop them from speaking out, but that they carefully measure and regulate what they say, where they say it and to whom’, the statement read.
‘NSS deploys agents throughout South Sudan and neighbouring countries, penetrating all levels of society and daily life’, it added.
‘NSS approval is required to hold public events, suffocating genuine dialogue. Credible and consistent accounts from multiple sources demonstrate that intelligence agents have infiltrated NGOs, the media, private sector security companies and hotels.
‘The depth and breadth of the NSS’s spy network creates an environment that infringes on freedom of opinion, expression and privacy’.
AI called on the South Sudanese government to urgently conduct independent investigations into cases of unlawful surveillance and other human rights violations to hold those responsible to account.
However, South Sudan’s information minister, Michael Makuei, has described the report as ‘baseless and unfounded’.
‘These are baseless and unfounded reports written against the government of South Sudan so that people earn a living’, he stated, according to Eye Radio.
‘Let them earn their living in other ways other than writing fictitious reports in order to tarnish the image of the government of South Sudan.
‘I think this person must be writing inside his room in a hotel in South Sudan’.
Source: Amnesty International Eye Radio
Photo source: European External Action Service
