A human-rughts activist who was arrested and interrogated on his way to a conference in Dublin was released in time to join the meeting yesterday.Mr Abdoulaye Math, leader of a human rights group in Cameroon, was arrested on Wednesday when boarding an Air France flight to Paris from Yaounde.
He was travelling to the Front Line conference on defending human rights defenders.
He told conference organisers that his documents for the conference were seized by plainclothes policemen and torn up. He said he was interrogated for five hours. "They demanded: 'What are you going to say in Dublin about Cameroon and are you taking these documents to file a case against President Paul Bya?' " he said.
The interrogation resumed on Thursday morning and lasted a further five hours. At 5 p.m. his passport was returned and he was told to go. Arriving in Dublin at 3 p.m. yesterday, he said: "I feel very relieved because I made it to the conference."
Mr Math said he was often harassed by the authorities and had an attempt on his life in 1999. "I have made a commitment to defend human rights so I am not afraid to return to Cameroon," he said.
Earlier at the conference, Prof Brice Dickson, the head of Northern Ireland's Human Rights Commission, said the commission was "sufficiently convinced by the quantity and quality of evidence" that security forces had plotted with loyalist paramilitaries to kill the solicitor, Mr Pat Finucane.
"We have therefore added our names to the long list of those who are calling for a public judicial inquiry into Mr Finucane's murder. I believe that some such inquiry will eventually take place. It is now only a question of when rather than if," Prof Dickson said.
He did not think that the inquiry called for by the British and Irish governments in the Weston Park document of August 2001 would go far enough to allay concerns.
