2005-2014

A Tehran revolutionary court's decision to hold Kurdish journalist Mohammad Sadegh Kabovand's trial behind closed doors under article 188 of the criminal code has been condemned by his lawyer, Masomeh Sotoudeh. The trial began on 25 May 2008. "This article can only be used for trials in which the details discussed could offend public morality, such as the trials of rapists," Sotoudeh said. She...

Yet another Senegalese journalist has been sentenced on criminal defamation charges within a week. This journalist, according to Afrol News, was found guilty of "publishing false news." Papa Moussa Guèye, director of the private daily L'Exclusif, was handed a six-month suspended prison term by a court in the capital Dakar. His troubles began after his paper published an article on President...

The Editors Guild of India on Tuesday condemned the attack on the offices of Telugu daily Andhra Jyoti by the activists of an organisation representing the backward Madiga community, terming it as an assault on "freedom of press". "This is an attack on the freedom of the press and there is use of intimidatory and inflammatory methods to silence the voice of the editors and journalists of Andhra...

Salimzhan Gaisin, deputy editor-in-chief of the newspaper Saratovsky Reporter, has been found guilty of a crime under Article 129 of the Russian Criminal Code (for "Slander in the Mass Media"), according to the Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations (CJES). In summer 2007, a group of residents in the village of Bulgakovka, located in the Voskresensk district of Saratov region, complained to...

Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has condemned the continuing use of violence against the independent press after 60,000 copies of the Zimbabwean On Sunday newspaper were intercepted and torched on the evening of May 24 and a freelance reporter was attacked and beaten in the eastern city of Mutare. “These attacks must not remain unpunished,” Paris-based RSF said. “Since the March 29 general...

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has reiterated a call to Senegalese authorities to end a pattern of criminal defamation prosecutions against the press after a court in the capital, Dakar, sentenced a journalist on Tuesday to a suspended prison term on a charge of "publishing false news," according to news reports and his lawyer. Papa Moussa Guèye, director of the private daily L...

A policeman on horseback struck photographer Víctor Salas several times with a metal riding crop while he was covering a protest Wednesday in Valparaíso, a city to the west of Santiago, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. Salas, who works for the Spanish news agency EFE, has been hospitalised and risks using the use of his right eye as a result of the blows. “Unfortunately this is not...

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has hailed a new ruling from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights that urges Argentina to void a criminal defamation sentence against a local journalist and reform its defamation laws. The decision by the international court, based in San José, Costa Rica's capital, was made public on Tuesday by the Argentine human rights organisation Centro de...

Three men accused of killing Congolese journalist Serge Maheshe in 2007 were convicted and sentenced to death, while two others were acquitted in a retrial that ended Wednesday. The trial failed to establish a clear motive for the crime, according to news reports and local journalists. The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) expressed concern that key aspects of the case remain...

Two Iraqi journalists were killed in separate incidents this week. Wisam Ali Ouda, a cameraman for the Afaq television station, was shot as he walked home in the Obaidi district of Baghdad on Wednesday morning, Reuters reported. The station’s public relations head Bushra Abdul-Amir told Reuters that witnesses said Ouda was shot by an “American sniper.” Station secretary Ghufran al-Bakri told the...