An appeals court in the Philippines has decided to curb outside scrutiny of legal proceedings against suspects in the 2009 Maguindanao massacre, in which 32 journalists and media practitioners were systematically shot and murdered, according to New York-based press freedom group Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). On April 12, Manila Court of Appeals Justice Danton Bueger ordered Monette...
Héctor Francisco Medina Polanco, 35, the host of a news programme on provincial TV station Omega Visión, died in a hospital in the northern city of San Pedro Sula on May 11 from the gunshot injuries he had received the day before, Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. Medina was shot twice in the chest and once in the arm by two men on a motorcycle who...
Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has condemned daily Utusan Malaysia’s decision on 21 April to fire one of its journalists, Hata Wahari, because he accused it of failing to provide the public with objective news coverage in the run-up to last year’s elections. “By firing Wahari, Utusan Malaysia’s management has just confirmed the correctness of his criticism,” RSF...
Yakhya Magomedov, the young editor of the Avar-language version of a bi-monthly magazine that promotes a moderate vision of traditional Islam, was gunned down in northern Dagestan on May 8, according to Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). “We offer our condolences to Magomedov’s relatives and colleagues and we urge the authorities not to leave his death unpunished,”...
Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has condemned the police violence to which 15 journalists were subjected while covering the three days of demonstrations in the capital that began on May 5. Making no attempt to distinguish between protesters and media personnel, the police roughed up reporters, carried out arrests and confiscated or smashed equipment. “The use...
Pakistan's decision on May 8 to not allow foreign broadcasters to continue to do live transmissions from Abbottabad must be rescinded immediately, New York-based press freedom group Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has demanded. "It is reckless for Pakistan to interfere with the flow of information from the site of what is one of the world's most important news stories. Falling back on...
The conviction and sentencing of two defendants in the 2009 double murder of freelance journalist Anastasiya Baburova and human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov is a landmark victory in the fight against impunity in press killings in Russia, the Committee to Protect Journalists said. Moscow City Court Judge Aleksandr Zamashnyuk gave defendant Nikita Tikhonov life in a strict-regime penal colony...
Reporter Abdelfattah Belaid was brutally attacked in Tunis Friday by police officers who pursued him into the headquarters of his newspaper, the French-language daily La Presse, after spotting him taking pictures of them dispersing protesters in the street outside. He was the second journalist to be beaten by police in Tunis in the past 24 hours. Belaid was photographing police officers using...
Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has welcomed this week’s decision by the French Senate to reject a bill that would have had made it a crime to deny that there was a genocide of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey in 1915. “There is of course no question of denying the reality of the Armenian genocide, but we think this proposed law threatened personal freedom,” RSF said....
Ernest Vardanean, a journalist who was sentenced to 15 years in prison on a charge of spying for Moldova at the end of a sham trial last December, was pardoned on May 5 by the breakaway Republic of Transnistria’s president, Igor Smirnov, according to Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). Detained since April 2010, Vardanean was able to return to his home in the...
