All independent media have been banned since the transition to a dictatorship in September 2001. No foreign or national media are authorised to operate in the country. The only existing “media” are those directly controlled by the Ministry of Information – a news agency, a few publications and Eri TV. They are subject to strict oversight and must relay the regime’s propaganda. Online access to news and information is very limited. The only ray of hope for those who want to know what is happening in Eritrea is Radio Erena, an independent and apolitical radio station run by exiled journalists in Paris since 2019. However, its radio waves are often jammed. 

The regime has a total grip on news and information, as does the paranoia of the dictator, Afeworki, who compartmentalises information and circulates it as little as possible, even among members of his government.

Freedom of the press is guaranteed by the constitution but has never been enforced. Independent journalism is effectively banned in the country. 

Eritrea is a country that has been bled dry and one of the poorest in the world. There is no advertising market for the media, the creation or implementation of which are prohibited.

Eritrean society has lived in fear for two decades. Dissidents are arrested or forced into exile, and freedom of expression is non-existent. The few foreign journalists who have been able to visit the country in recent years were often accompanied and the people they interviewed were kept under surveillance.

Many journalists languish in the regime’s prisons, without access to their families or lawyers, some without ever having been tried. Several have been held without trial longer than any other journalists in the world. “We won't release him and he won't have a trial”, the president said in a 2009 interview, referring to the Swedish-Eritrean journalist Dawit Isaak, who has been held incommunicado in appalling conditions since 2001. In July 2023, the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention said his detention was arbitrary and called on the Eritrean authorities to reveal his location. The regime’s surveillance is permanent. In Internet cafés, journalists are required to provide their identity before being allowed to connect to the Internet.