News

A two-year jail sentence was passed by a court passed Thursday on Hanevy Ould Dehah, the editor of the website Taqadoumy, at the end of an incomprehensible and arbitrary trial, according to Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). Dehah, who was not freed in December on completing a six-month sentence of a charge of violating public decency, was convicted this time on charges of violating public decency...

The Belarusian police are increasingly harassing and intimidating independent journalists by charging them with relatively minor offences, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. In the latest case, Ivan Shulha, a journalist who works for the privately-owned satellite television station Belsat TV and who is an active member of the independent Belarus Association of Journalists (BAJ), was...

Muhammad al-Maqaleh, editor of the opposition Yemeni Socialist Party’s news website Aleshteraki, who was detained in September has finally appeared in government custody. He is being held without charges, local news outlets reported, and alleges that he has been tortured, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Al-Maqaleh was detained by unidentified men in Sana’a after writing an...

Umuseso, one of Rwanda’s leading independent weeklies, could be closed down as a result of case brought by the public prosecutor’s office accusing it of libel and invasion of privacy for reporting that a government minister was having an extra-marital affair with the mayor of Kigali, according to Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). A neighbourhood court in Nyarugenge is due to issue its verdict on...

Three weeks after the earthquake, the Haitian press has just had its first serious run-in with the US military. Homère Cardichon, a photographer working for the daily Le Nouvelliste, had his camera confiscated by US marines Thursday while covering a demonstration by disgruntled residents outside the US embassy in the Port-au-Prince suburb of Tabarre. Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) urged culture...

A court order issued on Monday banned all Kazakh media and printing houses from publishing “any information that discredits the honor and dignity” of President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s son-in-law, a high-ranking energy executive, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has said. According to the US government-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Kazakh service, the Medeu District Court in...

An Egyptian criminal court on Tuesday sentence a journalist to one year in prison and a fine of 60,000 Egyptian pounds (US$10,500) on criminal charges filed by another journalist who is also a member of parliament, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has reported. According to local news reports, Yasser Barakat, editor-in-chief of the weekly Al-Mougaz was convicted of defamation in a suit...

An Iraqi government plan to impose restrictive rules on broadcast news media represents an alarming return to authoritarianism, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has said. New York-based CPJ denounced the rules and called on Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his government to abandon their repressive plan. CPJ’s review of the plan found rules that fall well short of international...

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has called on judges in Tajikistan’s capital, Dushanbe, to drop their defamation lawsuits against three popular independent weeklies for damage amounts that would bankrupt them. Claiming that Ozodagon, Farazh, and Asia-Plus published biased and defamatory articles about them in late January, judges Nur Nurov and Ulughbek Mamadshoyev of Tajikistan’s...

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has called for Saudi-run satellite operator Arabsat to return to air the Iranian-owned Arabic-language satellite channel Al-Alam, which stopped broadcasting January 27 without prior notice. In a statement published on its website, Al-Alam said that “Arabsat, in continuation of its censorship policies and as a move to confront the news networks which...