Angola the authorities in 2006. The World Organisation against Torture (OMCT) and the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) in the framework of their joint programme, The Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders indicated that they would take up his case at the 58th ordinary session of the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights taking place in April 2016. The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (UNWGAD) condemned his arrest and conviction as being “arbitrary and in violation of international law”. At the same time, security forces arrested Arão Bula Tempo, a human rights lawyer and the president of the Cabinda provincial Council of the Angolan Bar Association and his client Manuel Biongo. They were accused of “collaborating with foreigners to constrain the Angolan state”, because they had allegedly invited journalists from the Republic of Congo to cover the demonstration organised by José Marcos Mavungo. They were released on 13 May 2015 pending trial. As a condition of his release, he was not allowed to leave Cabinda without authorisation. With his health deteriorating he indicated that he did not feel safe receiving treatment in state-owned hospitals and wanted to be treated outside Cabinda province. However, the Angolan authorities denied him permission to travel. He was convicted and sentenced to 6 years in prison in September. This was days after the European Parliament’s resolution on Angola calling on the authorities to immediately and unconditionally release all human rights defenders, including José Marcos Mavungo, and to drop all charges against them. On May 18 João Massanga, commander of the Cabinda separatist movement (FLEC/FAC) was found dead in the vicin- ity of Pointe Noire, Republic f the Congo, on a road that connects the city to the border with Cabinda. FLEC declared in a statement that he was killed in a joint operation by Angolan and Congolese security forces. “The activists should never have been detained in the first place. Their continued detention is a sign of how far Angolan authorities will go to suppress dissent” – Amnesty International’s Deputy Director for Southern Africa, speaking on the Book Club 17 In June, 15 human rights activists were arrested in Luanda after organising a reading of an adaptation of American academic Gene Sharp’s 1993 book, From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation. The book’s cover describes it as “a blueprint for nonviolent resistance to repressive regimes”. Two more people were arrested later. Among the 17 were rapper Luaty Beirão, writer Domingos da Cruz and Nito Alves, who had already had a brush with the system two years earlier for printing 20 T-shirts with political slogans. The group also included a reserve military officer acquainted to one of the others in the group. They were sent to different prison facilities. They were accused of acts of rebellion, planning mass civil disobedience in the capital and producing fake passports, among other charges and were formally charged on 16 September 2015 with preparing a “rebellion and a coup attempt” against the president. Amnesty International described their detention as a “travesty of justice”. Beirão and several others went on hunger strike to protest his detention, with Beirão maintaining his hunger strike for 36 days. So This is Democracy? 2015 17