Saudi Arabia

Reporters Without Borders has called for an investigation into the death of Hussein Ali Madan Al-Faraj, a photographer and cameraman known as the “Revolution’s Journalist”, in the eastern governorate of Al-Qatif on February 20. Police killed Hussein Al-Faraj during a raid on the town of Al-Awamiyah with the aim of locating participants in a long series of anti-government protests in the...

A 12-year jail sentence has been passed by a Riyadh court on Wadji Al-Ghazzawi, the owner of Al-Fajr TV and host of a programme called “Al-Fadfada” (Relaxed Conversation), for accusing Saudi Arabia of links with terrorism and Al-Qaeda in particular. In its February 4 sentence, the court also banned Ghazzawi from leaving the country for 20 years after completing his jail sentence and from ever...

The Committee to Protect Journalists condemned the 12-year jail term handed to a TV presenter in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday. The journalist has 30 days to appeal. A court in the capital, Riyadh, convicted Wajdi al-Ghazzawi, host of Wajd TV satellite channel, of "harming the nation's image," according to the official Saudi Press Agency and regional human rights groups. The 12-year prison sentence...

The Saudi government issued a decree on April 29 imposing new restrictions on the media and drastically limiting press freedom. The decree, which amends five articles of the 2000 press and publications law, is clearly designed to ensure that the protests sweeping the Arab world since the start of the year do not take any greater hold in Saudi Arabia than they have already. The decree bans...

Online newspapers and blogs based in Saudi Arabia will now need to register with the Saudi Ministry of Culture and Information to operate. The new guidelines and rules will be added to the current publishing and printing law. Abdul Aziz Khaja, Minister of Information and Culture, stressed that the list is a tool of regulation – rather than restricting freedom of speech. He said it is in line with...

The Lebanese news website Al-Akhbar is being harassed after it published US diplomatic cables that were first disclosed by WikiLeaks. The website was hacked last week by unknown attackers, while the Tunisian government blocked domestic access to the site. Saudi officials blocked access to the independent website Elaph, which also published some of the cables. "We condemn efforts to restrict news...

New York-based press freedom group Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has called on Saudi authorities to immediately release Mohamed al-Abdulkarim, an Islamic law professor, human rights activist, and the editor-in-chief of an online magazine. He was arrested on Sunday, two weeks after an article he wrote was published online. Al-Abdulkarim wrote critically about the Saudi Arabian royal family...

An Egyptian journalist in Riyadh, who works as a correspondent of Kuwait's Al-Rai Arabic newspaper, was injured in a gun attack on Wednesday, according to arabnews.com. Subhi Rakha, the journalist, was attacked by a group of Saudi youths after he tried to settle a quarrel between them and an Egyptian with the help of others. The young men, after the quarrel had seemingly been settled, opened fire...

I was unceremoniously fired this month by my Saudi newspaper, a leading English-language daily called Arab News. It didn't matter that I had been the senior columnist on the op-ed page for nine years or that my work was quoted widely in the European and American media, including this paper. What mattered was that I had committed one of the three cardinal sins an Arab journalist must avoid when...