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Nearly a month after the arrest of two French documentary filmmakers working in northern Togo, new questions are emerging over the arbitrary detention of the journalists, who hold all valid work credentials but still face criminal charges in a case that has reignited international scrutiny of press freedom restrictions in the West African nation.

According to global media rights organization Reporters Without Borders (RSF), Gaël Mocaër and Sebastian Perez Pezzani were taken into custody on July 27 while filming a documentary project for France Télévisions in the northern Togolese city of Kara. Despite holding legally issued work visas and official filming authorization, the pair have now been formally charged with “false declarations,” a charge RSF calls completely unsubstantiated.

A third individual, Fred Vedomey, the journalists’ local Togolese fixer, has also been detained alongside the two French citizens. As of the latest update, all three are being held in pre-trial detention at a law enforcement facility near Lomé, Togo’s capital. RSF has also raised urgent alarms over Pezzani’s well-being, confirming he is currently experiencing severe health complications that require immediate access to specialized medical care.

The production company behind the documentary, Tony Comiti Productions, has issued a formal statement affirming that Mocaër and Pezzani fully complied with all existing Togolese administrative regulations for foreign journalists working in the country. The company emphasized that the two men are seasoned, veteran documentary professionals with decades of experience reporting across the globe, and that their work in Togo had no political agenda, focused solely on documenting the daily experiences of local communities.

France’s foreign ministry has confirmed the detention of its two nationals, but has not released any additional details on the case. Togolese government officials have so far declined to issue any public comment on the arrest or the charges against the three detained individuals.

While official explanations for the detention remain undisclosed, independent and local reporting has put forward a controversial hypothesis: the two French journalists are being held as political leverage to push France into extraditing Ferdinand Ayité, a Togolese investigative journalist who has lived in exile in France since 2021. Ayité was arrested in Togo four years ago over online comments that drew criticism from sitting government ministers, before eventually fleeing the country. Neither French nor Togolese authorities have publicly confirmed or denied this speculation.

This case is the latest in a growing pattern of restricting press freedom in Togo, which already holds a low rank of 97th out of 180 countries on RSF’s annual World Press Freedom Index. Just earlier this year in June 2025, two major French broadcasters — France 24 and Radio France Internationale (RFI) — were suspended from operating in Togo for a three-month period, after Togolese authorities accused them of spreading “inaccurate and biased” coverage of anti-government protests. Both outlets strongly rejected all accusations of improper reporting. In 2024, another French journalist, Thomas Dietrich, was arrested while covering national electoral campaigning in the country and subsequently expelled, per records from the International Press Institute.

Thibaut Bruttin, RSF’s Director General, said the organization remains deeply alarmed that the unjust detention has stretched on for more than 20 days. “The organization condemns these unjustified and disproportionate proceedings and calls for the immediate release of the French media professionals,” Bruttin said.

Family members of the two detained French journalists have also released a joint statement, shared via RSF, expressing their ongoing distress over the prolonged uncertainty. “We are devastated by the deprivation of liberty being endured in Togo by our partners, our fathers, our sons and our brothers,” the statement read. The families added that daily uncertainty and anguish have weighed heavily on them since the arrest, and they are holding out hope for a swift resolution to the case. They also emphasized that Mocaër and Pezzani are passionate storytellers dedicated to centering the voices and lived realities of the people they meet in their reporting.

In a development that has amplified existing tensions between Togo’s government and French media organizations, a prominent press freedom advocacy group confirmed Thursday that two French documentary filmmakers and their local Togolese fixer have been transferred to pretrial detention after more than three weeks of custody in the West African nation.

Reporters Without Borders, the Paris-based media freedom watchdog widely known by its French acronym RSF, confirmed that filmmakers Gaël Mocaër and Sebastian Perez Pezzani, alongside Togolese fixer Fred Vedomey, were formally remanded into pretrial detention this Monday. The three individuals face charges of submitting false declarations as part of their immigration processing when entering Togo, and RSF has issued an urgent call for their immediate release.

According to RSF’s account of the incident, the two French filmmakers were on location shooting an installment of a documentary series for France Télévisions, France’s national public television network, when Togolese law enforcement moved in to arrest the full crew on July 27. The arrest took place in Kara, a region in northern Togo, an area that has faced repeated security challenges in recent years from insurgent attacks carried out by armed factions affiliated with al-Qaida and the Islamic State group.

This detention case unfolds against a shifting geopolitical backdrop in West Africa, as Togo has deepened diplomatic and military ties with Russia in recent months, aligning itself with Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger — three Sahel nations that have expelled French military forces, sidelined French political influence, and built closer strategic partnerships with Moscow. Last year, Togo and Russia signed a formal military cooperation agreement that establishes a framework for joint military training exercises and capacity-building programs between the two countries.

Tensions between Togolese authorities and French media have been escalating for months. In June 2025, Togolese regulators suspended all domestic broadcasts of two major French international media outlets, Radio France Internationale and France 24, for a three-month period. Officials at the time accused the outlets of publishing inaccurate, biased reporting during their coverage of nationwide public protests against long-time Togolese leader Faure Gnassingbé.

RSF has pushed back against the government’s charges, confirming that the documentary crew applied for and received official work authorization from Togo’s Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Arts to carry out their filming project. But Togo’s Culture Minister Isaac Tchiakpé has directly refuted that claim, telling The Associated Press that the crew would never have faced detention if they had secured all necessary permits and followed all required administrative protocols.

Togo’s national media regulator, the High Authority for Audiovisual and Communication (HARC), also stated that it never received a formal accreditation request from either the filmmakers or France Télévisions, and had no advance notification that the crew planned to film in the sensitive northern region.

RSF’s account of the crew’s detention timeline adds further context: law enforcement seized all of the crew’s filming equipment during the initial arrest, held the three for three days before releasing them briefly on July 30, then moved to re-arrest the group shortly after and transfer them to the capital Lomé to face formal charges.

The press freedom organization has denounced the legal proceedings against the three as “unjustified” and “disproportionate,” adding an urgent public health note: Perez Pezzani lives with a serious pre-existing chronic health condition that requires immediate, specialized medical attention that RSF says he cannot access properly in Togolese pretrial detention.

Against the backdrop of years of persistent drought, ongoing armed conflict, and a global reallocation of humanitarian aid, Somalia is teetering on the edge of a catastrophic hunger crisis that threatens millions of vulnerable lives, the top leader of the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) has warned. During an on-site visit to a nutrition clinic on the outskirts of Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital, WFP Executive Director Carl Skau told the Associated Press that the agency currently holds just 10 percent of the funding it had in 2022, when a coordinated international intervention successfully averted a full-scale famine in the conflict-battered East African nation.

Today, with drastically diminished resources, WFP can only provide the most basic life-saving support, Skau emphasized. “We’re only able to direct these critical nutrition supplies to children who are in the most life-threatening condition,” he said. The steep drop in funding stems from two key factors: reduced aid commitments from international donors, and the redirection of existing humanitarian budgets to respond to newer crises around the globe, leaving Somalia’s long-running emergency severely underfunded.

The scale of unmet need is staggering. U.N. projections estimate that 6 million Somalis — nearly 30 percent of the country’s total population — are currently living with acute food insecurity. This year alone, 1.9 million children under the age of 5 are expected to suffer from acute malnutrition, with nearly 500,000 facing severe acute malnutrition that requires urgent, life-saving treatment. These numbers align with estimates from Somalia’s own disaster management authority, which has called the current situation “extremely alarming,” noting that 1.85 million children are already malnourished, 6 million people are impacted by the ongoing drought, and 2 million require immediate life-sustaining assistance.

The human cost of the funding shortfall is visible on the ground at Mogadishu’s Feynuus Health Center, a corrugated-metal facility that serves hundreds of displaced families every day. Dozens of women carrying fragile, undernourished children queue for hours under sparse shade or crowd along the clinic’s veranda, waiting for the limited nutrition support available. Inside, clinical workers screen children for malnutrition, weigh young patients in blue cloth slings, and distribute what stocks of therapeutic food they have left.

For many families, the journey to the clinic is a desperate effort born of utter necessity. Halima Mohamed Hassan, a 32-year-old pregnant mother of six, walked nearly 2 miles carrying her malnourished 4-year-old to reach the center. She told reporters she had not eaten anything for two full days; her last meal was a small portion of plain rice. Her other five children are also undernourished, but she could not carry all of them to the clinic for treatment. “I could not carry all of them,” she explained simply.

Hassan’s story encapsulates the cascading crises that have pushed millions of Somalis to the brink. Four months ago, she fled her home in Lower Shabelle region after her husband died from complications of malnutrition. Drought had already wiped out her family’s crops and dried up their water sources, and escalating conflict between government forces and the al-Shabab militant group made staying in the region deadly. She and her children walked for four consecutive nights to reach an internally displaced persons camp on Mogadishu’s outskirts, where she now shares a flimsy makeshift shelter with her widowed mother and her mother’s four children. Together, the two women take occasional day work washing clothes in nearby neighborhoods to feed a combined household of 12 people.

Even local health facilities are buckling under the strain of increased demand and reduced funding. Abdirahman Barkhad, program director for Youth Link Somalia, the local NGO that operates Feynuus Health Center, said the clinic sees between 250 and 350 malnutrition patients every day, most of them displaced women and children from drought-stricken regions outside the capital. Ten nearby nutrition and health centers have already closed their doors due to lost humanitarian funding, he added, forcing all those patients to crowd into the few remaining open facilities. “We have witnessed children collapsing right here at the center, because their families do not have enough food to keep them strong,” Barkhad said.

During his visit to the country, Skau heard consistent accounts of despair from families across affected regions. In the southern town of Burhakaba, mothers told him that persistent drought had destroyed their harvests, widespread insecurity prevented them from accessing aid in their home areas, and skyrocketing food prices had pushed even basic staple foods out of reach. Many walked three to four hours just to reach a functioning health clinic, because aid convoys cannot safely travel to many remote communities. “I spoke to women with eight to 10 children,” Skau recounted. “They don’t know where their next meal is going to come from.”

Long-standing insecurity compoundes the crisis, making humanitarian operations far more costly and difficult to carry out. Somalia has been locked in a 15-year insurgency by the al-Shabab militant group, which controls large swathes of rural territory and regularly attacks government and aid targets. WFP is forced to use expensive aircraft to deliver supplies to areas where road travel is too dangerous for staff and convoys, and hundreds of thousands of people in hard-to-reach communities cannot be reached at all with current resources.

Adding to the pressure, emerging conflicts in other regions — most notably the ongoing war in the Middle East — have driven up global fuel and food prices, disrupted agricultural supply chains, and drawn billions in humanitarian funding away from long-running crises like Somalia’s, Skau explained.

After her 4-year-old child received a ration of therapeutic food at Feynuus, Hassan turned back toward the displaced persons camp where her family waits. Her five other children are still hungry, she said, and she will have to walk back to the clinic again in the coming days, one child at a time, to get them the help they need. WFP leaders stress that they have the expertise and on-the-ground capacity to prevent another famine — but only if donors step up to restore funding for the crisis.

“We know what’s going on, we have the capacity, we have the experience of dealing with this,” Skau said. “We just need the resources now to do it.”

This reporting is supported by the Gates Foundation as part of AP’s global health and development coverage, with the AP retaining full editorial control over all content.

On Thursday, the first contingent of 20 deportees touched down at Roberts International Airport, located just outside Liberia’s capital Monrovia, marking the start of a contentious agreement that will see the West African nation accept a total of 1,200 deported migrants from the United States. This deal stands as one of the most expansive third-country deportation arrangements advanced by the Trump administration during its widespread crackdown on unauthorized immigration.

Liberian Information Minister Jerolinmek Piah confirmed that the 1,200 total deportees to be received under the pact include not only African citizens but also migrants originally from North America, South America, and the Caribbean. During a public briefing earlier this week, Liberian Justice Minister Natu Oswald Tweh clarified that most of the incoming deportees have been convicted of migration-related violations. Tweh also noted that any deportee wishing to seek asylum in Liberia would be permitted to do so.

Immigration rights advocates have long documented that the Trump administration negotiated a network of largely confidential third-country deportation agreements with close to 24 nations around the globe, roughly 10 of which are located across Africa. Through these deals, the administration has deported thousands of migrants to countries that are not their countries of origin.

Immigration legal experts warn that this third-country deportation policy functions as a deliberate legal loophole. Rather than processing asylum claims fairly, the practice indirectly pressures asylum-seekers to return to the home countries they fled to escape violence, persecution, or crisis. In numerous documented cases, migrants are sent to nations they have never visited before, where they face significant safety hazards, leaving them with virtually no alternative but to travel back to the dangerous regions they initially left.

Nearly four nautical miles off the coast of the Eyl district in Somalia’s semi-autonomous Puntland region, an act of maritime piracy has reignited longstanding concerns over organized hijacking in one of the world’s most dangerous waterways. A Somali government official, speaking on condition of anonymity due to restrictions on discussing sensitive security information, confirmed to the Associated Press that the Cameroon-flagged cargo vessel M/V LUTUF was seized by pirates this Monday. The hijacked vessel, which was carrying a cargo of Turkish military hardware and specialized communications technology, was subsequently redirected toward the Nugaal coast of the Puntland region.

Details of the hijacking reveal that the 10-person crew on board the M/V LUTUF comes from four different nations: six crew members hold Indian citizenship, one is Turkish, one is Georgian, and two Serbian nationals are employed as armed security guards on the vessel. The ship is owned by Polar Movement Shipping, and its cargo was officially documented as bound for a Turkish military training installation in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu. Along with the shipment of weapons, the vessel was also carrying communications infrastructure and advanced satellite equipment for the facility, the official confirmed. As of Thursday, Turkish government officials had not released any public statement confirming or commenting on the hijacking incident.

According to the official’s account, eight pirates carried out the seizure, and investigators believe they belong to the same criminal network that hijacked another commercial vessel, the M/V Sward, back in late April. After taking control of the M/V LUTUF, the pirates sailed the ship to a holding position off the coast near Garmaal, located in Puntland’s Dangoroyo district. In the hours after the hijacking, two vessels owned by Turkish interests arrived in the area to monitor the situation, while Turkish military helicopters and unmanned drones conducted ongoing surveillance of the hijacked ship and surrounding waters.

On Tuesday, a small civilian boat carrying two people approached the anchored M/V LUTUF to deliver khat, a mild stimulant widely chewed for recreational and cultural purposes across Somalia, the official said. Once that small boat returned to the Somali shore, an airstrike targeted the area, leaving four people dead and two others with severe injuries. To date, key details about the strike remain unconfirmed by independent observers: it is still unclear which military force carried out the attack, and it has not been independently verified whether the people killed and injured were the pirates responsible for the hijacking. The current status of the M/V LUTUF, its entire crew, and its sensitive military cargo also remains unconfirmed publicly, as independent journalists have not been able to access the site to verify all details of the official’s account. Suzan Fraser contributed additional reporting from Ankara, Turkey.