News

Anyone who dares to speak out in Syria continues to be exposed to arbitrary arrest. One of the latest victims is Omar Koush, a writer and journalist from Aleppo, was arrested on arrival at Damascus airport Monday after participating in a conference in Turkey. He wrote an article on April 29 titled “Turkey: dual relations between Arab countries on the one hand and Islamist organizations on the...

Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has condemned underground publisher and poet Bui Chat’s arrest at Tan Son Nhat airport on April 30. The founder of the Giay Vun publishing house, Chat had just returned from Buenos Aires, where he had received the “Freedom to Publish Prize” from the International Publishers Association (IPA). “The Vietnamese authorities gave no reason...

Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has expressed concern over the fate of Somyot Pruksakasemsuk, editor of the magazine Voice of Thaksin, who was arrested by the Department of Special Investigation (DSI) on April 30 and was placed in pre-trial custody Monday by a Bangkok criminal court on a charge of lèse-majesté. A request for release on bail was rejected. “This...

Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) is concerned about all the libel actions being brought against Armenian newspapers and the disproportionate damages being demanded, which threaten their survival and create a climate that encourages self-censorship. This tendency to use lawsuits to throttle news media must be reined in. The repeal of jail sentences for libel and...

New York-based press freedom group Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has welcomed the guilty verdict in the 2009 murder of Anastasiya Baburova, freelance reporter with the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta, who was shot and killed in Moscow along with human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov. Markelov had represented Novaya Gazeta journalists in various legal cases. On Thursday, a jury at the...

The BBC and the Associated Press Television News (APTN) censored satirical coverage of Friday’s royal wedding in London by The Chaser, an Australian comedy team. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) was forced to cancel The Chaser’s alternative coverage of the wedding after the BBC threatened to withdraw its feed from the national broadcaster if it did not stop the programme. The BBC was...

Arnulfo Aguilar, the director of Radio Uno, an educational radio station based in San Pedro Sula, narrowly escaped an armed ambush outside his home on the outskirts of the city on the night of April 27 which he blames on the army. A station that supports the opposition National Front for Popular Resistance, Radio Uno has often been targeted by the security forces since the June 2009 coup d’état...

The Rwandan government has been hounding one of its media bugbears, Jean Bosco Gasasira, editor of the bimonthly newspaper Umuvugizi and one of the country’s most outspoken journalists, Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has said. Prosecutors Thursday asked Rwanda’s supreme court to sentence him to ten years in prison on charges on which the Kigali high court acquitted...

A court in the Colombo suburb of Pugoda refused to release Shantha Wijesuriya, a journalist with the Lanka E-news online newspaper, on bail pending trial on a contempt of court charge for an erroneous news report. Access to the website was also blocked on an order from the court pending the outcome of the trial, according to Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF)...

Responding to restrictions and attacks on its staff, Al-Jazeera has suspended its operations inside Syria indefinitely, the Qatar-based news network told the Committee to Protect Journalists today. Damascus has subjected Syrian employees of Al-Jazeera to sustained pressure to resign from the widely viewed satellite news channel, the station's Public Liberties and Human Rights Section told CPJ...