Botswana dition laws violate the Constitution. It also found that the Station Commander had not been unreasonable when he refused the lawyers access to Mokone when they returned from buying him food. The court therefore dismissed the claim that legal representation was refused on the basis that although access to his lawyers was delayed (by no less than 24 hours, according to Mokone) he was nonetheless granted permission to see them. Pointedly, the court agreed with the uncontested evidence of the Commissioner of Police that the Sunday Standard story was defamatory. delivered on 2 February this year, constitutes “an injudicious and unwarranted attack on the Sunday Standard and its Editor Outsa Mokone”. As only the second person to be prosecuted under sedition laws in the history of Botswana (the first was a Radio Botswana journalist named Samuel Mbaiwa in the 1980s), there is an assumption that the authorities’ harassment of Mokone is politically motivated. The charges followed the Sunday Standard’s involvement in a number of investigative articles revealing the government’s complicity in corrupt activities. Quoting Mokone, the Civicus State of Civil Society Report 2018 clarifies: The gradual shrinking of media freedom, freedom of expression and lack of access to information was subtle and languid and comes down to the conflation of power in the Executive. A lot of money had been siphoned off through the Intelligence Services. They simply do not have to account for it. They were giving tenders to themselves and friends and family. We ran a number of stories. Around the same time the Directorate on Corruption and Economic Crime (DCEC) was investigating the head of the Intelligence and we were able to get hold of the docket and started running the investigation. The DCEC went to court to stop us (...). In this saga, not least significant is the fact that the author of the story, Edgar Tsimane, remains in exile in South Africa where he has been granted temporary asylum. In a separate incident, the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting (OCCRP) project in March 2017 in a statement detail how the Botswana Intelligence Service “briefly detained three journalists as they were heading to one of President Ian Khama’s private residences to determine whether or not he was using public funds for renovations”. It is for these reasons that in the opinion of a lawyer who works closely with MISA Botswana, the judgment of Justice Brand of the Court of Appeal, which was The journalists - Ntibinyane Ntibinyane, Joel Konopo and Kaombona Kanani were following the lead on a story that the president was using military and So This is Democracy? 2017 33