Nairobi — Repression Spikes Amid Military Abuses, Growing Insecurity
Burkina Faso's military junta arrested three journalists on March 24, 2025, for reporting on the government crackdown on the media, Human Rights Watch said today.
The authorities arrested Guezouma Sanogo and Boukari Ouoba, respectively president and vice president of the Burkina Faso's Journalists Association (Association des journalistes du Burkina), and Luc Pagbelguem, journalist at the private television station BF1, in the capital, Ouagadougou. The current location of the three men is not known, raising concerns about enforced disappearances.
"The arbitrary arrest and disappearance of the three journalists shows the Burkina Faso junta's desperation with controlling the truth and ensuring that military authorities can commit abuses with impunity," said Ilaria Allegrozzi, senior Sahel researcher at Human Rights Watch. "The military junta should take immediate action to locate and release the three journalists."
Since taking power in a 2022 coup, the military junta of President Ibrahim Traoré has systematically cracked down on the media, the political opposition, and peaceful dissent. Amid a growing Islamist insurgency, the military junta has been using a sweeping emergency law to silence dissent and illegally conscript critics, journalists, civil society activists, and magistrates into the military.
On March 21, 2025, the Journalists Association held a news conference denouncing the military junta's restrictions on freedom of expression and calling on the authorities to release arbitrarily detained journalists. On March 24, men in civilian clothes claiming to be policemen working for the Burkinabè intelligence services arrested Sanogo and Ouoba. Two members of the intelligence services arrested Pagbelguem for covering the Journalists Association's news conference. The next day, the territorial administration minister dissolved the Journalists Association.
Colleagues of Sanogo and Ouoba said lawyers searched for them in various police and gendarmerie stations across the capital to no avail and that the authorities had failed to officially respond to their requests for information. On March 25, the intelligence services took both Sanogo and Ouoba to their homes to facilitate a police search, then took them away again to an unknown location, colleagues said.
BF1 said officials told them that "they only want to interrogate our colleague," but the whereabouts of Pagbelguem remain unknown. The station formally apologized for reporting on the news conference.
In another recent arrest, on March 18, men claiming to be gendarmes arrested the well-known political activist and journalist Idrissa Barry in Ouagadougou. His whereabouts also remain unknown. Barry is a member of the political group Servir et Non se Servir ("To Serve and Not Serve Oneself," or SENS), which four days before his arrest, issued a statement denouncing "deadly attacks" by government forces and allied militias against civilians around Solenzo, in western Burkina Faso, on March 11.
In June 2024, members of the security forces arrested the prominent journalist Serge Oulon, director of the investigative newspaper L'Événement ("the Event"), and television commentators Adama Bayala and Kalifara Séré. The authorities denied holding them until October 2024, when they acknowledged that they had been conscripted into military service. Their whereabouts also remain unknown.
In April 2024, Burkina Faso's media regulator suspended the French news network TV5 and several other media outlets for two weeks after they reported on a Human Rights Watch report that found the military had committed crimes against humanity against civilians in the Yatenga province. The regulator also blocked the Human Rights Watch website in the country.
Dozens of journalists have been forced to flee Burkina Faso under threat of imprisonment, torture, enforced disappearance, and forced conscription because of their work.
"I left Ouagadougou, and I'm not planning to return," a journalist told Human Rights Watch after the arrest of Idrissa Barry. "Free media is dead in this country - all you can hear is government propaganda."
The latest crackdown on the independent media has coincided with escalating fighting throughout the country. In the past two weeks, the Al-Qaeda linked Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims (Jama'at Nusrat al-Islam wa al-Muslimeen, or JNIM) has attacked army positions in several regions, killing soldiers and civilians. Local sources reported that on March 15, 2025, JNIM fighters attacked the military base in Séguénéga, northern region, and killed seven civilians as well as at least four soldiers fighting alongside local militias. Human Rights Watch verified a video showing JNIM fighters assaulting a fortified compound on a hill in the center of Séguénéga.
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"Burkina Faso's relentless descent into large-scale violence is not getting the scrutiny and media coverage it deserves domestically because independent media outlets have been silenced," said a Burkinabè journalist in exile. "Unfolding events such as the deadly attack on civilians in Solenzo and elsewhere are never reported in the pro-government media or are reported in a biased way."
International human rights law prohibits arbitrary restrictions on the rights to freedom of speech and expression, including by detaining or forcibly disappearing journalists. The International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, to which Burkina Faso is a party, defines enforced disappearances as the arrest or detention of a person by state officials or their agents followed by a refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty or to reveal the person's fate or whereabouts.
"The need for independent media in Burkina Faso has never been greater," Allegrozzi said. "The authorities should change course and end their brutal crackdown against journalists, dissidents and political opponents."
