News

Journalist Tumba Lumembu was freed on November 15, exactly two months after he was arrested on a Kinshasa street, Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. A reporter for the newspaper La Tempête des Tropiques, he was abducted on a street in the capital on September 14 by members of the National Intelligence Agency (ANR). When President Joseph Kabila attended a...

Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has called for the withdrawal of bill which is about to be submitted to parliament and which would allow the authorities to block public access to official documents including judicial decisions, new legislation and public records. Announced on October 22 and called the “General Law Amendment Bill,” the proposed law’s sole aim seems...

Iranian authorities announced on Tuesday that two German reporters for Bild am Sonntag will be charged with espionage, according to international news reports. They were arrested in October while interviewing the son of a woman sentenced to death by stoning on charges of adultery. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has expressed alarm at these developments and called on Iranian authorities...

A Singapore court Tuesday sentenced British writer Alan Shadrake to six weeks in prison and a fine for 20,000 Singapore dollars (11,320 euros) for criticising the country’s use of the death penalty in his book Once a Jolly Hangman: Singapore Justice in the Dock. Failure to pay the fine would add two weeks to his sentence. Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) deplored the...

An appeal court has upheld the decision of a Tashkent court to fine Uzbekistan’s few remaining independent reporters, Abdulmalik Boboyev 10,000 dollars. The fine is 400 times what he earns every month as Voice of America correspondent, Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. Boboyev is entirely innocent of the charges on which he was convicted – defaming and...

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has condemned the Singapore High Court's sentencing of British author Alan Shadrake to prison over his book criticizing the nation's judiciary. The court Tuesday sentenced Shadrake, 76, to six weeks in prison, and fined him 20,000 Singapore dollars (US$15,400) for contempt of court, according to international news reports. He was convicted on November 3...

While the Azerbaijani Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that the country will uphold the Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights decision to immediately release editor Eynulla Fatullayev, he remains in jail. The Committee to Protect Journalists called today for his immediate release. A November 5 decision by the Baku Appeals Court said the editor must remain in custody while he appeals an...

Two incidents in recent weeks have again highlighted the dangers for journalists in Pakistan. One is the detention of Ghulam Rasool Khan in the eastern province of Punjab without due process since November 3. The other is the disappearance of Abdul Hameed Hayatan, also known as Lala Hameed, in the southwestern province of Balochistan, where his colleagues think he was abducted by security...

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has expressed alarm at reports that Kyrgyz journalist Azimjon Askarov has been beaten repeatedly in custody. On Wednesday, an appeals court in the southern Jalal-Abad region upheld the life sentence given in September to Azimjon Askarov, a reporter, researcher, and head of the local human rights group Vozdukh, and six of his co-defendants, the Moscow...

Azerbaijan’s supreme court Thursday partially complied with a European Court of Human Rights ruling from last April by quashing jailed newspaper editor Eynulla Fatullayev’s 2007 convictions on charges of terrorism and inciting hatred, thereby recognising that his rights were violated. But it upheld a third 2007 conviction on a charge of tax evasion and a July 2010 conviction on a charge of...