By Deng Ghai Deng<\/p>\n
Union of Journalists of South Sudan (UJOSS) has raised concerns over the disappearance of Emmanuel Monychol Akop, Editor-in-Chief of The Dawn Daily English Newspaper, following his alleged arrest by the National Security Service (NSS) last month.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n On November 28th, officers believed to be from the NSS visited The Dawn office in Juba, held a meeting with Akop, and subsequently took him into custody. Since then, Akop has not been heard from, and no arrest warrant was presented to the staff.<\/p>\n Patrick Oyet, President of UJOSS, emphasized that South Sudanese law mandates that any individual arrested be brought before a competent court within 24 hours.<\/p>\n \u201cAt the moment we don\u2019t have any official information. What we have is informational information. [Monychol] whereabouts is not known, it\u2019s only informationally where people suspect that he is in the Blue House,\u201d Oyet said.<\/p>\n The arrest has sparked concerns about the growing powers of the NSS under the National Security Service Act of 2014, which was amended in 2024 to allow arrests without a warrant.<\/p>\n This provision has drawn criticism from international human rights organizations and press freedom advocates, who warn that it could undermine civil liberties and press freedom.<\/p>\n Akop\u2019s arrest adds to a troubling trend of harassment against journalists and media professionals in South Sudan, raising alarms among both local and international observers.<\/p>\n When reached for comment, NSS spokesperson John David Kumuri did not respond to questions sent via WhatsApp at the time of this publication.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Deng Ghai Deng Union of Journalists of South Sudan (UJOSS) has raised concerns over the disappearance of Emmanuel Monychol Akop, Editor-in-Chief of The Dawn Daily English Newspaper, following his alleged arrest by the National Security Service (NSS) last month. On November 28th, officers believed to be from the NSS[Read More…]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[80,79],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31761","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-national","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onecitizendaily.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31761","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onecitizendaily.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onecitizendaily.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onecitizendaily.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onecitizendaily.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31761"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.onecitizendaily.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31761\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31762,"href":"https:\/\/www.onecitizendaily.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31761\/revisions\/31762"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onecitizendaily.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31761"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onecitizendaily.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31761"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onecitizendaily.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31761"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}