Liberian information minister Laurence Bropleh continues to make a stalwart but surprising defence of his government’s targeting of the Monrovia Independent newspaper for publishing an obscene photograph of another cabinet minister.

Disgraced Minister of Presidential Affairs Willis Knuckles tendered his resignation on 25 February after a picture of him in a sex act with two young girls surfaced on the internet. Accepting it, President Ellen Sirleaf-Johnson said his behaviour “while not illegal, is improper and inappropriate for a public servant.”

But when the Independent newspaper in Monrovia reprinted a copy of the obscene picture in its coverage of Knuckles’s resignation two days later, the government snapped. It revoked the newspaper’s license for a year, ordered its offices closed and sent officers of the country’s National Security Agency round to Monrovia’s print houses to warn them off printing the paper.

Bropleh did not name the Independent during his comments to an April 20-21 conference on post-conflict press freedoms organised by International Media Support (IMS) and sponsored by the Danish committee of UNESCO. Instead he reserved his ire for Liberian media rights groups which had supported the paper against the ban.

In fact the Press Council of Liberia had been as critical of the Independent for republishing the photograph as Bropleh had been, and suspended the membership of the paper and editor Sam Dean for three months. Nevertheless, concerned along with others about the security services’ involvement, they still supported The Independent’s petition to Liberia’s Supreme Court for a lifting of the ban.

Sadly there were no representatives of the Liberian media rights community at the Copenhagen conference and thus able to put the minister straight.

But sat on a conference panel with Bropleh on Saturday to debate the issue of access to information in post-conflict societies, Index on Censorship did try. We defended the media rights groups’ right to protest the way the state acted against the Independent, regardless of any question about the paper’s taste and judgment.

Perhaps, this correspondent suggested, the publication of the photo was a criminal matter – possibly even a civil one – “more appropriately dealt with by a detective constable from Monrovia High Street police station than the security services.”

Bropleh reasserted that it was the NSA’s jurisdiction. The Media Foundation for West Africa reported in February that publication of the pictures could be a breach of Section 18.1 of Liberia’s Penal Code, which ‘prohibits the dissemination of obscene materials without minimizing the risk of exposure to children under sixteen,’ citing a senior police official.

In fact the rest of the Liberian government has since distanced itself from the use of NSA officers to enforce the closure. Another government spokesman, Gabriel Williams, has told the Monrovia Inquirer that “such an act will not be repeated,” as he said, Liberia ‘subscribes to the rule of law, democratic governance and free press.’

‘The government has acknowledged that it did not follow due process,’ commented the US Committee to Protect Journalists on the case. ‘We urge the Supreme Court to rescind the ban against the paper.’

Bropleh is a minister of a Liberian church as well as a minister in the Liberian government. Apart from demonstrating his possible unsuitability for at least one of those jobs, what does any of this matter?

Actually, quite a lot.

Liberia is bracing itself for the withdrawal of a multinational peacekeeping force, the largest committed to Africa in United Nations history, and in place since the end of the country’s civil war four years ago.

This month the Johnson-Sirleaf government announced plans to create a new paramilitary security force, tasked to tackle riots and other threats to national stability, independently of the country’s existing national police.

Given the way the National Security Agency besieged The Independent after its Willis Knuckles’ resignation coverage, in a manner that the Press Union described as ‘akin to intimidation,’ media rights groups are right to be concerned about how the new so-called ‘Quick Reaction Unit’ will react the next time a government minister is offended – or is caught being offensive – by the country’s press.