News

The Committee to Protect Journalists has condemned criminal defamation convictions handed to two Senegalese journalists on Tuesday last. The two were convicted for reporting on the contents of an anonymous letter critical of top security officials. A criminal court in the capital, Dakar, sentenced Director Jules Diop and Editor-in-Chief Serigne Saliou Samb of private daily newspaper L'Observateur...

Agil Khalil, a reporter for the Azerbaijani opposition daily Azadlyg has been assaulted several times in the past three months. Authorities have taken no measures to guarantee his protection, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). On May 10, Khalil tried to fly to Istanbul to visit his relatives, but border guards at the airport in Baku stopped him, citing an order by the...

A Venezuelan court has convicted a former police officer for the 2006 murder of photojournalist Jorge Aguirre, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has reported. The Caracas 14th Mixed Trial Tribunal convicted Boris Blanco, a former police officer in the Chacao municipality of Caracas, of Aguirre’s homicide, according to reports in the Venezuelan media. The court gave Blanco a 15-year prison...

A newspaper in Cambodia has had to stop publishing a pullout on Burma after authorities confiscated that section for two consecutive days, warning that a suspension would soon follow. The English-Khmer Cambodia Daily started the pullout, called the "Burma Daily", on May 16, "to introduce to the Burmese people what a free and responsible newspaper looks like", its publisher Bernard Krisher was...

Private weeklies in Burma have been ordered by the Press Scrutiny and Registration Board not to run any story that depicts the destruction caused by the cyclone that pummelled the Rangoon and Irrawaddy deltas; rather, they have been told to cover only the reconstruction efforts by authorities, Mizzima News has reported quoting local journalists. Mizzima's sources spoke on condition of anonymity...

Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has expressed concern over the detention of freelance journalist Al-Ghali Yahya Shegifat, who has been held incommunicado in an unknown location since May 14. Neither his family nor his lawyer has been able to contact him and the charges against him are unknown. "The way this journalist has been made to virtually disappear is illegal and outrageous," Paris-based RSF...

The Office of the Special Prosecutor for Crimes Against Journalists is looking into the killing of two radio journalists from the Triqui indigenous community in Oaxaca. This welcome development inspires hope that impunity will not prevail in this case, unlike the way it has in the murders of so many other journalists in Mexico, ARTICLE 19 and Centro Nacional de Comunicación Social (CENCOS) have...

The International Press Institute (IPI) has expressed its disappointment at the adoption of a package of reforms to the Slovene penal code, which includes amendments that expand liability for criminal defamation. According to information before IPI, a government-backed bill containing sweeping reforms to the Slovene criminal code was introduced to the Slovene Parliament on January 28, 2008. The...

There has been a spate of arrests, detentions, and trials of journalists in Vietnam, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Somsak Khunmi, a long-time news assistant and contributor to Chan Troi Moi (Radio New Horizon) was sentenced today to nine months in prison and three years probation following a six-hour trial Tuesday last on terrorism charges at the People’s Court of Ho Chi...

Two masked men fired at reporter Edson Ferraz of TV Diário (a station affiliated to the privately-owned Rede Globo network) on May 15 in Mogi das Cruzes, an outlying suburb of São Paulo in Brazil. Ferraz escaped unhurt. The 25-year-old journalist had been covering a case of corruption and money-laundering involving 19 local policemen and had been warned of possible reprisals. “In some respects...