Overview
- Atiana Serge Oulon, director of the newspaper L’Événement, was taken from his Ouagadougou home on 24 June 2024 and remains forcibly disappeared with no public accounting by state authorities.
- A May 2026 Reporters Without Borders probe says security forces held Oulon in private villas converted into unofficial prisons near the US embassy, where detainees were beaten, deprived of food, and denied contact with family or lawyers.
- The government publicly acknowledged a journalist’s arrest in July 2024 and later said Oulon and other critics had been conscripted into the armed forces, a practice rights groups call unlawful and politically motivated.
- Rights and press organizations including Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, RSF and FIDH are calling for Oulon’s immediate release, full investigations into enforced disappearances, and accountability for officials implicated in abuses.
- The case fits a wider pattern since the 2023 emergency law of curtailed media space, use of conscription to silence critics, and the conversion of villas in Ouaga 2000 into secret detention sites that leave families without recourse.