On 1 August, security personnel seized Addis Standard editor-in-chief Yonas Kedir in Addis Ababa, assaulted him, and held him about 24 hours. The next day armed security and intelligence officers raided the newsroom. They took cameras, microphones, and production gear, and wrecked lighting in the studio, according to the outlet’s publisher, JAKENN Publishing.
On 3 August the landlord gave a three-day eviction notice for a building the paper had used for 16 years. The publisher said police compelled the notice and that it is fighting it in court. JAKENN is already in court over a February decision by the Ethiopian Media Authority to revoke the outlet’s online registration.
This is not a one-off. In April, managing editor Million Beyene was taken from the newsroom by men in plainclothes and held incommunicado for nearly two weeks, then released without charge. He later left the paper. Human Rights Watch says the pattern fits a wider squeeze: arbitrary arrests of journalists, licenses pulled, and final written warnings in late July against Arts TV and Ahadu FM.
Abiy Ahmed’s Prosperity Party still talks about reform. The record this year is detention, a smashed studio, and a forced move. CPJ asked the Ministry of Justice and the Government Communication Service for comment. It got none.
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