2005-2014

A Moscow military court has decided to press on with the retrial of three alleged accomplices in Novaya Gazeta reporter Anna Politkovskaya’s murder, rejecting a petition by the Politkovskaya family for it to be postponed while further investigations were carried out. Presiding judge Nikolai Tkachuk on Friday denied the request although it was supported both defence lawyers and prosecutors. “We are...

Lawyers attacked and manhandled reporters and cameramen on the premises of the Lahore High Court on Thursday after the hearing of a suo motu case pertaining to the thrashing of a policeman and reporters by some lawyers in a sessions court last week. According to the Dawn, a high court bench was hearing the case when a large number of lawyers present in the courtroom started shouting slogans...

A BBC journalist who went undercover to expose failings in care for the elderly has been arrested. Arifa Farooq was detained on Wednesday and held in a police cell in the wake of a Panorama investigation into care providers in South Lanarkshire, a BBC report said. Some details: [ Link] It is believed her arrest is related to an alleged failure to provide accurate personal details to the employer...

Two physical attacks on journalists in the past month and two ongoing trials have again highlighted the aversion that local authorities in Turkey display towards reporters who try to cover local government corruption. “Local officials in Turkey do not hesitate to beat up journalists who criticise them,” Reporters Sans Frontières (RSF) said in a statement. “These frequent beatings are unacceptable...

Officials shut down the office of the Association of Iranian Journalists in Tehran on Wednesday night, just after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was sworn in for a second term, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has reported. Director Badr al-Sadat Mufidi, told the BBC Persian service that agents stormed the office with a warrant from Saeed Mortazavi, Tehran's prosecutor general. The...

A Gambian court has sentenced six journalists to two years in jail and imposed heavy fines on them on six counts of sedition and criminal defamation. Failure to pay the fines will lead to an additional two years in jail. The six journalists, working for two private newspapers—the Point and Foroyaa—had republished a June 11 Gambian Press Union statement criticising President Yahya Jammeh's comments...

CNN has asked cable operators in the US that carry its channel to block a commercial, produced by liberal media watchdog group Media Matters, which critiques CNN's Lou Dobbs, the New York Times has reported. CNN managers said in a morning staff meeting on Tuesday that the channel had invoked unspecified agreements with operators to stop the ad from running. The ad accuses Dobbs of “promoting the...

The news editor of Zambia's largest newspaper went on trial Wednesday on charges of distributing pornographic images. Chansa Kabwela, 29, a news editor at the Post newspaper, distributed the photos of the woman giving birth in the car park outside Lusaka's University Teaching Hospital in June. The trial commenced with the state prosecutor complaining about comments by Reporters sans Frontières...

Uzbek authorities should immediately free the independent journalist Dilmurod Saidov, sentenced Thursday last to 12 1/2 years in prison following a flawed trial brought on politically motivated charges, Human Rights Watch has said. The trial was riddled with procedural violations, and several witnesses ultimately withdrew their testimony, saying they had given false evidence, rendering his...

A journalist from China Central Television was sentenced Tuesday to three years in prison with a four-year reprieve for accepting a bribe in northern Shanxi province, China Daily has reported. The Xinghualing District Court in Taiyuan, capital of Shanxi, convicted Li Min of accepting 37,000 yuan ($5,400) and using her job to lobby for a suspect in a case being investigated by the Xinghualing...