Angola This led the Catholic Church to say in a statement issued in March at the conclusion of its annual Episcopal Conference that the crisis in Angola is partly due to the “mentality of cronyism and nepotism and the growing discrimination that is the result of increasing partisanship within the public administration, in which genuine merit and competence are being sacrificed.” The bishops point the finger at the “lack of ethical standards, mismanagement of the public purse and generalised corruption” in the country. The year 2015 saw the death of the Angolense newspaper. Angolense was of the independent papers at the turn of the century. It was bought out in 2010, when well-resourced media groups entered the market and introduced a swathe of new publications, offering better quality papers and good salaries to lure the best journalists from the remaining independent papers. After all these years it is still not clear who owns these groups – Score Media, Media Investments and Media Nova –, despite a requirement in the Press Law that the names of the owners must be made public. From a healthy spread of independent papers a few years ago, only Folha 8 survives. Folha 8 Editor William Tonet said the paper is now “the last target of the regime’s snipers”. NEW LEGISLATION For the year under review, it was the turn of human rights activists to bear the brunt of the government’s drive to quash all forms of dissent. A United States State Department report said corruption in Angola was the root cause of incidents of torture, beatings and limits to the rights of freedom of association, expression and the press. Angola rejected the report, saying Angola has no political prisoners. February saw the tabling of draft regulation on the activities of NGOs, proposed by the Ministry of Social Assistance and Reinsertion and the Service of External Intelligence. Under the guise of preventing terrorism, the draft regulation, which will be adopted by Presidential decree, contains a number of provisions that will considerably jeopardise the work of independent human rights organisations. Among others, the regulation requires NGOs to have certificates of registration to be authorised to carry out their activities, failing which they risk suspension or closure. However, most independent human rights organisations, have never received their certificate from the Ministry of Justice. At the same time, the government has added a new weapon to its already formidable arsenal, enacting the Law on Precautionary Measures in Criminal Proceedings, which allows the state to detain suspects indefinitely. The new law approved in December also does away with the need for a judge to issue search warrants; all requirement being an authorisation from the Attorney General’s Office, a body that answers to the Office of the President of the Republic. THE SWORD AND THE PEN In May, Angolan investigative journalist Rafael Marques de Morais was the recipient of the “Voice of Free Expression” award from the Index on Censorship for his work exposing corruption in government and business in Angola. May also saw the resumption of Marques’s on-off defamation case over his 2011 book “Blood Diamonds: Torture and Corruption in Angola,” which recounts 500 cases of torture and 100 killings that took place over 18 months in a diamond-mining district in Angola. According to the book, the torture and So This is Democracy? 2015 15