Maati Monjib (Moroccan historian, journalist, press-freedom activist) — statement to RSF after his 2021 conviction on "state security"/money-laundering charges that rights groups call fabricated: "This conviction is doubly unjust… [we committed] no crime except exercise our right to freedom of expression and association." Jailed and hunger-struck.

This conviction is doubly unjust because neither my fellow defendants nor I have ever threatened 'internal state security' or committed any other crime except exercise our right to freedom of expression and association.

[Source is English (Reporters Without Borders / RSF — a reputable international press-freedom organisation — reporting his statement); tier-2, confirmed verbatim against the fetched page (apostrophe glyphs normalized). NOTE: Monjib is Franco-Moroccan and may have given the statement in French; the cited text is RSF's English rendering. published_date left NULL: the statement followed his 27 January 2021 conviction but the exact date is not established — not fabricated.] Declared position of Maati Monjib (b. 1961) — a prominent Moroccan historian, journalist and press-freedom activist; founder of the Ibn Rochd Centre and of the Moroccan Association for Investigative Journalism (which trained 450+ journalists), and a persistent critic of the Moroccan state's (makhzen's) restrictions on the press and civil society. Long harassed by the authorities, he was prosecuted for "undermining internal state security" and later "money laundering" — charges that international rights groups (RSF, Amnesty, CPJ, PEN, the European Parliament) call fabricated retaliation for his activism; in 2021 he was convicted and went on a 20-day hunger strike before being released. Responding to his conviction, he insisted it was "doubly unjust" because he and his co-defendants had committed "no crime except exercise our right to freedom of expression and association." This is the MOROCCAN PRESS-FREEDOM / FREE-EXPRESSION / CIVIL-SOCIETY pole — independent journalism and academic freedom against the makhzen's security-pretext repression, a distinct cell complementing the Gulf and Egyptian free-expression defenders (Nabeel Rajab, Patrick Zaki, Alaa Abd El-Fattah) already in the dataset. [Axes: civil-liberties (free expression; free press; freedom of association; against security-pretext prosecution), democracy / governance (civil society vs the makhzen; rule of law; accountability), regime-stance (critic of the Moroccan authorities' repression).]