Ignace Sossou , investigative journalist for the information site Bénin Web TV, will appear before the Cotonou Court of Appeal tomorrow April 28, 2020. Convicted for “harassment by electronic means” in December 2019, he is detained in a prison in the Beninese capital for more than four months. Pursued for having relayed on social networks the words of a prosecutor held during a workshop on disinformation, he nevertheless committed no fault. In a video confronting the magistrate’s statements and the journalist’s tweets, RSF had managed to prove his total innocence and to show that he had taken verbatim the words of the prosecutor, whom he considered, as a journalist, to be ‘They were of public interest
A court in Benin’s largest city, Cotonou, on August 12 handed Sossou, a reporter with the privately owned Benin Web TV news website, a suspended sentence of one month imprisonment and a fine of 500,000 CFA francs (US$850) for alleged “publication of false information by electronic networks” under article 550 of Benin’s digital code