Rights groups are raising urgent alarms over the persecution of journalists and legal advocates across Africa, with new details emerging about the enforced disappearance of a Burkinabe investigative journalist and the expulsion of a prominent Kenyan human rights lawyer from Uganda.

In Burkina Faso, a landlocked West African country that has been under military rule since a 2022 coup led by Captain Ibrahim Traore, investigative journalist and editor Serge Oulon has now been missing for two years. Armed men identifying themselves as state agents seized Oulon from his home in Ouagadougou, the capital, shortly after he published a story exposing corruption within the security forces. An investigation by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has located him in detention at a private property in the capital, where he has reportedly been subjected to torture and held without access to a lawyer or contact with his family.