News

On the first day of his trial Monday before a state security court, journalist Abdul Ilah Haydar Shae challenged the court’s legality and said those responsible for his abduction and forced disappearance should also be on trial, according to Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). His lawyers, Abdel Rahman Barman and Khaled Al-Anssi, attended the hearing as observers and...

During the 15th hearing Monday in the trial in Istanbul of newspaper editor Hrant Dink’s alleged killers, the court rejected the Dink family’s request for the murder to be reenacted in the presence of alleged hitman Ogün Samast at the spot where Dink was gunned down, outside the office of his Turkish-Armenian weekly Agos in the Istanbul district of Sisli. In a surprise development, the court...

The pressure used by the US and Iraqi authorities in an attempt to prevent the website Wikileaks from releasing about 400,000 “classified” US military documents about the war in Iraq was both absurd and contrary to the principle of access to public information, Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has said. The documents shed light on the scale of the violence that the...

Preposterous charges have been brought against the Sabaa news agency reporter Abdul Ilah Haydar Shae, whose trial before a special state security court is due to start Monday, according to Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). A specialist in covering Al-Qaeda, Shae has been charged by the attorney-general with inciting the murder of the president and his son, “belonging...

Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) says it has received several calls from journalists complaining of the difficulties they have had in covering the ongoing street protests against the government’s pension reform plans. A Canal+ reporter was hit repeatedly by members of the CRS riot police in Paris on October 17. On the grounds of an alleged “invasion of the privacy”...

CPJ is concerned by Vietnamese authorities' recent crackdown against several bloggers and one print journalist. On Monday, police arrested Phan Thanh Hai, a blogger who writes under the name Anh Ba Saigon (Saigon Brother Three), after raiding his Ho Chi Minh City home, according to Agence France-Presse. Police seized his desktop and laptop computers, along with documents he had printed from the...

Swaziland's Prime Minister, Barnabas Sibusiso Dlamini, has announced his intention to create a law requiring newspaper columnists to seek permission before they write critically about the government, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has reported. Dlamini's statement appeared in the Tuesday edition of state daily Swazi Observer, according to the Media Institute of Southern...

A popular Angolan radio commentator, whose satirical broadcasts have been critical of the government, was injured in a stabbing this morning in the capital city of Luanda, according to local journalists and news reports. António Manuel Manuel Da Silva, better known as "Jójó," was walking home around 3 a.m. when he was stabbed by an attacker who confronted him about his program on private Radio...

A 13-year prison sentence has been handed down last week by a Burmese court to Nyi Nyi Tun, editor of the Kandarawaddy news publication, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). On October 13, the Seikkan Township court attached to Rangoon's Insein Prison found the journalist guilty of "crimes against the state." He was convicted of violating the Unlawful...

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has expressed concern over the health of imprisoned Tunisian journalist Fahem Boukadous. It has called upon the Tunisian government to release him immediately. Boukadous, who suffers from acute asthma, started a hunger strike on October 8 to protest the conditions of his detention at Gafsa prison, about 229 miles (369 km) southwest of Tunis. According to...