News

The Rwandan parliament passed a resolution on October 22 calling on the government to ban the BBC and bring “genocide denial” charges against the presenter and producer of a controversial TV documentary about the 1994 Rwandan genocide that the BBC broadcast in early October. The vote came a few days after President Paul Kagame himself accused the BBC of “denying the genocide” of Rwanda’s...

The National Union of Somali Journalists (NUSOJ) has welcomed the release on bail of two Shabelle Media Network journalists and called on authorities to free the two other journalists still behind bars. Abdimalik Yusuf, chairman of the Shabelle Media Network, and Ahmed Abdi Hassan, deputy editor of Radio Shabelle, were freed on bail after the Deputy Attorney General Mohamed Hassan stated on...

The release of Thomas Dandois and Valentine Bourrat, two French journalists who have been held for the past 11 weeks in Indonesia’s eastern province of Papua on a charge of misusing their tourist visas to do investigative reporting, is imminent. After being sentenced Friday to two and a half months in prison by a court in Jayapura, Papua’s capital, they are to be released this week. The...

Islamic State’s Jihadi militants are imposing a news and information dictatorship in the areas they dominate in Iraq and Syria. Local and foreign journalists are no longer able to work properly and crimes of violence against them are on the increase, according to Reporters Without Borders. What with news media being closed, censored or self-censored and journalists being threatened, hunted down...

Clarín, Argentina's major media conglomerate, has proposed its own reorganisation but the regulatory agency rejected that proposal on 8 October. The effect is that, five years after the LCSA was adopted, the government will take charge of the Clarín restructuring, according to Reporters Without Borders. The government and the Clarín group continue at odds, with their conflict centring on the...

Argentine news organisation Grupo Infobae has said that Venezuelan authorities have blocked access to an online platform the group created to circumvent a similar block on its main website less than three weeks ago. The group announced that it was setting up a new domain, Infobae.media, in the wake of authorities’ decision to block the domain Infobae.press, which it set up after Venezuelan media...

Reporters Without Borders, Network for Reporting on Eastern Europe (n-ost) and Civil-Centre for Freedom (a Macedonian human rights NGO) have called for Macedonian journalist Tomislav Kezarovski’s immediate release and the quashing of his conviction on a spurious charge of revealing a protected witness’s identity. Sentenced to four and a half years in prison in October 2013, Kezarovski spent...

Unknown gunmen shot the Mogadishu Bureau Chief for the independent, U.K.-based Somali Channel Television on October 12, 2014, outside his home in the Howlwadaag neighborhood in the capital, Mogadishu, according to local journalists and news reports. Abdirisak Jama had just returned from work and was sitting outside his home when gunmen drove past in a vehicle and shot him repeatedly in the stomach...

Peruvian authorities must conduct an efficient and thorough investigation into Friday's attack on a radio station in which assailants killed the wife of a journalist, the Committee to Protect Journalists has said. On the pretext of purchasing ads, a man entered Radio Rumba, in the town of Pichanaki in central Junín department, at about 5:30 am on Friday. He was followed into the station by a...

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) and the Bangladesh Manobadhikar Sangbadik Forum (BMSF) have condemned the assault on journalist Abdullah Al Noman in the capital Dhaka on October 16. According to reports, the cadres of the Bangladesh Chhatra League (BCL), a wing of the ruling party the Bangladesh Awami League, attacked Noman in front of MC College auditorium. Noman is the Sylhet...