2005-2014

(RSF/IFEX) - Madrid investigating judge Santiago Pedraz announced on 24 May 2007 that he has rejected an appeal by the prosecutor’s office against his decision to indict three US soldiers for the murder of Spanish cameraman José Couso, who was killed when a US tank shelled the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad on 8 April 2003. Prosecutor Jesús Alonso had appealed against the indictment on the grounds...

(IAPA/IFEX) - MIAMI, Florida (June 4, 2007) - The Inter American Press Association (IAPA) said today that it will keep a close watch on the legal battle between private and state shareholders of the Ecuadorean newspaper El Telégrafo in the hope that the dispute will be conducted transparently and according to due process. Carlos Navarette Castillo, the paper's editor since 2002 and a descendant of...

(HRinfo/IFEX) - The Tunisian government must respect the rule of law and terminate the house arrest imposed on the journalist and prisoner of opinion Abdallah Al-Zawary for five years, said the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (HRinfo). Al-Zawary has been under house arrest since June 2002. After spending 11 years in prison, Al-Zawary had been released in June 2002. Immediately upon his...

Journalists at The Wall Street Journal, the US financial newspaper being stalked by Rupert Murdoch, may stage a walk-out if he buys the title's parent company Dow Jones, according to sources close to the publication. The Bancroft family, which controls 64 per cent of Dow Jones through shares with special voting rights, said last week it would enter talks with Murdoch's News Corporation after it...

Nearly 60 journalists have been murdered in the past months, and prosecution of journalists for "treason" and "extremism" are on the rise, according to the annual half-year review of press freedom by the World Association of Newspapers (WAN). The report, presented Saturday to the Board of the Paris-based WAN on the eve of the World Newspaper Congress and World Editors Forum in Cape Town, South...

The UN Security Council has established an international criminal tribunal empowered to prosecute individuals responsible for a series of deadly attacks against Lebanese journalists in 2005. The Security Council approved resolution 1757 on May 30, establishing an international criminal tribunal to prosecute the masterminds of the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri, who...

Cable operators in Pakistan have decided to block transmissions of television channels broadcasting negative programmes against the "solidarity of Pakistan, armed forces and the judiciary." The Cable Operators Association of Pakistan (CAP) Saturday announced that it could not become a party to the "campaign of TV channels." The chairman of the association, Khalid Shaikh, said cable operators were...

New York, June 1, 2007—The Committee to Protect Journalists mourns the slayings of four Iraqi journalists during an especially deadly week in the country. Nazar Abdulwahid al-Radhi, 38, a correspondent for the independent news agency Aswat al-Iraq and Radio Free Iraq, was gunned down in the southern city of Al-Amarah on Wednesday morning. Three men wearing white uniforms and riding in a pickup...

New York, June 1, 2007—The Committee to Protect Journalists today renewed its call for the immediate release of captive BBC reporter Alan Johnston following the disclosure of a videotape showing the journalist alive and in apparent good health. The tape was the first proof of Johnston’s condition that captors have offered since the abduction in the Gaza Strip more than two months ago. The video...

Reporters Without Borders voices its support for the tributes being paid in Paris to Lebanese journalist Samir Kassir on 4 June, to mark the second anniversary of his car-bomb murder in Beirut on 2 June 2005. A meeting is to be held at the Arab World Institute in Paris. At the same time, the press freedom organisation wonders why the investigation into his death is so slow and why no one has yet...