News

In response to a petition from the Union of Burundian Journalists (UBJ), the Constitutional Court has quashed certain provisions of the media law that was promulgated on 4 June 2013. The court’s ruling, issued on 7 January, invalidated articles providing for huge increases in fines and other penalties that could be imposed on journalists in an arbitrary manner. “While we obviously approve the...

The Committee to Protect Journalists welcomes the news that three abducted journalists in Syria have been freed this week. The Swedish Foreign Ministry confirmed today that freelance Swedish journalists Magnus Falkehed and Niclas Hammarstrom, both of whom were abducted in November, were released. On Sunday, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet DavutoÄŸlu said Turkish intelligence services had helped...

Reporters Without Borders has taken note of a New Year’s Day announcement by the president’s office lifting bans on The Standard newspaper and Teranga FM community radio station. The bans had been in effect for more than 16 months. “This announcement, described as a goodwill gesture by President Yahya Jammeh for the New Year, must not divert attention from all the violations of freedom of...

Reporters Without Borders and partner organisation Journalist in Danger (JED) have condemned yesterday’s attack, on 30 December 2013, on state-owned Radio Télévision Nationale Congolaise (RTNC) in Kinshasa by men armed with clubs and machetes, and urge the authorities to do everything possible to provide journalists with more protection. The approximately 30 assailants stormed the national...

This is a story of two disasters and their respective coverages in the US media: that of the Katrina hurricane disaster and the Haiti earthquake. Each disaster was covered differently in the US news media, researcher Jennifer Petersen has found. The bottomline was this: the disaster in New Orleans became, over the course of the coverage, a catastrophe, an exception, whereas the earthquake in Haiti...

Hakimeldostu Mehdiyev, the correspondent of the Institute for Reporter Freedom and Safety (IRFS) in Sharur, in the north of the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic, has been charged by the district prosecutor’s office with “diverting electricity” under article 189-1 of the criminal code. Sanan Pashayev, the official in charge of the investigation, made Mehdiyev signed an undertaking that he would not...

Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reiterated its call to the judicial authorities to drop all charges against BBC correspondent Urinboy Usmonov, whose trial began on August 16 in the northern city of Khujand. “Usmonov’s claims of being tortured while in detention are shocking,” RSF said. “They must be the subject of a serious investigation and those responsible...

Harassment of the independent newspapers Narodnaya Volya and Nasha Niva continues despite last month’s withdrawal of a legal bid to have them closed. They have each been fined 14 million roubles (2,000 euros) for the warnings they had received from the information ministry in recent months. Narodnaya Volya has said it intends to appeal. “Two weeks after giving the two newspapers encouraging signs...

Severe restrictions have been placed by the Propaganda Department on media coverage of the high-speed train crash on July 23 in the southeastern Chinese city of Wenzhou, in which 39 people were killed, Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. Wang Qinglei, a producer with state-owned China Central Television, was fired on July 27 because of his investigative...

Security officials in Nakhchivan – an autonomous Azerbaijani exclave between Armenia and Iran – have been harassing journalists in an attempt to impose a news blackout on a death in detention and the disappearance of four other young people who had been summoned for questioning, according to Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). “After eliminating almost all the sources...