Fiji Police Seize OCCRP Reporting Fellow’s Phone After Post on Corruption

OCCRP has condemned the seizure by Fiji police of a phone belonging to one of its affiliated journalists,  after she made a social media post about alleged corruption in the force.

Meri Radinibaravi, an investigative reporting fellow with OCCRP, was called into the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) in the country’s capital shortly after posting — and quickly deleting — the Facebook comment.

The incident occurred during a tense period for the Pacific island nation of nearly one million people. Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka is currently weighing whether to declare a national state of emergency in response to a surge in drug trafficking and organized crime.

At the same time, the authorities have launched a high-profile murder investigation into the death of a drug suspect who died while in military custody. Radinibaravi, who joined OCCRP last year, has been closely covering that inquiry and investigating the broader infiltration of organized crime into Fiji’s police and military ranks.

“Calling a journalist into a police station and forcing her to surrender her phone is an unacceptable attack on press freedom and independent media in Fiji,” Miranda Patrucic, the editor in chief of OCCRP, said in a statement. “It is designed to harass the journalist and is a brazen attempt to target her sources.”

“We demand the immediate return of her equipment and a guarantee that no data has been accessed or compromised,” Patrucic added.

The Fiji Police Force and its commissioner, Rusiate Tudravu, did not respond to questions sent by OCCRP.

Radinibaravi said police contacted her on Wednesday afternoon, informing her that they needed to question her regarding her Facebook post, which referenced allegations of corruption during the tenure of Sitiveni Qiliho, a former police commissioner who was later convicted and imprisoned for interfering in a criminal investigation.

Radinibaravi said police told her they would send a squad car to her home to pick her up— a suggestion she found intimidating . She instead offered to go to the CID office on her own.

At the headquarters, a detective from the cybercrime unit questioned Radinibaravi and asked her to type up a formal statement. In it, she wrote that she had made the post without malicious intent and had subsequently deleted it.

After she signed the statement, the detective informed Radinibaravi that the police needed to confiscate her phone for a digital forensic analysis. Radinibaravi initially refused but said she eventually felt forced to surrender the device. She said she believed the pressure from police may have been connected to her ongoing reporting on sensitive corruption allegations within the department.

Fiji has a fraught history regarding press freedom, marked by periods of strict censorship, particularly during past states of emergency and following military coups.

However, the media landscape had recently shown signs of opening up. In 2023, Rabuka — who himself cracked down on the press after leading a military coup in the late 1980s — championed the repeal of a draconian media law that had long threatened journalists with hefty fines or imprisonment for criticizing the government.