All four journalists arrested recently have been released by the Senegal government in a bid to “defuse relations" between the press and the government, but the storm has far from blown over. All four were released Thursday. Besides the four arrested journalists, who were all held in detention, a fifth has been facing defamation charges after he published a book that accused employees of
The Georgian government shut down two popular Tbilisi-based television channels shortly before declaring a state of emergency Wednesday night. Imedi, considered the main Georgian opposition television and radio broadcaster, was raided by special forces and taken off the air. Kavkaziya, a small independent channel, was also shut down. Later Wednesday night, Prime Minister Zurab Nogaideli told a
On a sweltering summer day of August 11, 2003, Reda Helal left his office like any other day, but this time never to reach home. No one knows where he disappeared, nor is anyone bothered to know. Today, Reda Helal, a senior editor at Egypt’s daily Al-Ahram, has been long forgotten. Four years after Helal disappeared in central Cairo, in a special report 'The Forgotten Man', the Committee to
He was an uncompromising journalist, he demanded press freedom in an east African country, and he was imprisoned for six years without any trial. Till today, Dawit Isaak awaits his fate in one of the 314 prison centres scattered throughout Eritrea. An Eritrean with Swedish citizenship, Isaak was arrested in September 2001 in Asmara along with 10 other journalists, including newspaper owners and
An Azeri court sentenced a journalist on Tuesday to 8-1/2 years in prison on terrorism charges and for inciting racial hatred, quadrupling his present jail sentence. A lengthy prison sentence handed down Tuesday by an Azerbaijani court to independent editor Eynulla Fatullayev. Fatullayev is already serving a two-and-a-half-year prison term for allegedly defaming Azerbaijanis in an Internet posting
An arm of the Russian prosecutor-general has decided to open a criminal probe into the mysterious July 2003 death of Yuri Shchekochikhin, deputy editor of the Moscow newspaper Novaya Gazeta. “We welcome this important if overdue step on behalf of Russian prosecutors to uncover the truth about the death of our colleague Yuri Shchekochikhin,†Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) Executive
The latest jail terms handed down to journalists in Egypt are making the country being seen as one of the most repressive for media in the world. A court has imposed a sentence of one-month’s forced labour on editor of Al-Wafd, Anwar Al-Hawari and Younes Darwish, the daily’s correspondent in Assyout, 380 km south of Cairo, for “publishing false news†about fraud by two members of the
A look at Israeli television channels and one can have a fair idea how far Israel lags behind in representing minorities. A regular TV viewer in Israel may never come across an Arab doctor advising on a flu virus, or an Arab lawyer giving tips on labour laws. Thanks to the almost no Arab presence on TV and radio. A recent study by the Israeli Centre for Strategic Communication has revealed some
