assessment of the harm inflicted. Yet during the trial of Le Journal, the judge neither asked Moniquet to document the cost of the harm endured by the ESISC nor explained how he arrived at the figure of 3 million DH for damages. (Moniquet acknowledged in a phone conversation with Human Rights Watch on April 20, 2006 that the court never asked him to detail how the material and moral damage he suffered added up to the 5 million DH he was seeking. He mentioned to Human Rights Watch, however, on April 10, 2006, that in addition to impugning the institute's reputation, Le Journal'sarticle had contributed to the decision by at least one client to postpone or cancel a commission to the ESISC for North-Africa related work.) Both the defendants, on one side, and the plaintiff and the prosecutor on the other, appealed the verdict, with the defendants seeking acquittal and the opposing parties appealing the 3 million DH judgment as too low. On appeal, the defense asked the Rabat Court of Appeals to nullify the lower court's conviction because of alleged procedural errors, notably the refusal to summon the witnesses proposed by the defense. The appeals court judge refused this motion, but, at his own initiative, subpoenaed the two witnesses proposed by the defense during the lower-court trial. Only one of the two, Spanish scholar Bernabé López-García, attended. He took the stand at the April 4 session of the trial – by which date the defense had already withdrawn from the trial to protest the court's refusal to nullify the lower-court verdict. The judge asked Lopéz-García only one substantive question: Did the government of Morocco order or pay for the paper produced by the ESISC? López-García replied that he did not know. The judge avoided the line of questioning sought by the defense, which was to probe whether experts on the Western Sahara conflict considered Le Journal's critique of the ESISC report to be reasonable. On April 18, the Appeals Court affirmed the lower-court verdict and sentence. According to defendant and Le Journal director Aboubakr Jamaï, the record judgment against Le Journal was motivated not by its alleged defamation of the ESISC but rather by the article's underlying argument, which was that Moroccan authorities were mismanaging the Western Sahara issue by trying to discredit the Polisario and cast it as an unworthy partner for negotiation. Authorities, who are intolerant of criticism of their Western Sahara policy, found in the ESISC's libel complaint a convenient instrument for punishing Le Journal, Jamaï told Human Rights Watch on April 20. Disturbing events that coincided with the lower-court trial of Le Journal reinforced suspicion that Moroccan authorities were seeking to pressure or punish the weekly. On February 14 – two days before the lower-court verdict – demonstrators rallied outside Le Journal's downtown Casablanca headquarters, denouncing it on the grounds that it had reprinted the controversial cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad first published in a Danish newspaper. A similar rally, also to protest Le Journal's supposed publication of the cartoons, took place the day before in front of the parliament building in Rabat Moroccan television ran entirely one-sided coverage of the demonstrations, interviewing the angry protestors without airing conversations with any staff member of Le Journal or pointing out that in fact the weekly had never reprinted the cartoons.