Africa

Emmanuel Emeka Asiwe, editor of the Huhuonline ( http://huhuonline.com) website, has been released after a week of interrogation by Nigeria's State Security Service, the domestic intelligence agency, but deplores its refusal to let him to go back to the United States, where he lives. “Irked by websites with political or satirical content, the Nigerian authorities are trying to force online...

The Sudanese police Monday arrested 70 journalists in capital Khartoum where they had gathered to present a memorandum to lawmakers asking them to revise the Press and Media Law and to make it conform to the interim constitution. Scores of journalists rallied outside parliament condemning the censorship which flouts the freedom of expression supposed to be enshrined in Sudan's interim constitution...

The police has shut down Radio Galkayo and arrested journalist Hassan Mohammed Jama, the director of the radio station in the Mudug region of Puntland, the National Union of Somali Journalists (NUSOJ) has reported. The commander of the Puntland police in the region, Colonel Abdirisak Ismail, who is known as Darwish, along with a team of well-armed police officers raided Radio Galkayo at 2:00 p.m....

Zambia's members of Parliament (MPs) have called for the regulation of media organisations through the use of statutory instruments as opposed to self-regulation because of the alleged biased media coverage of the just ended presidential by-election. According to a report in the Zambia Daily Mail of November 14 and the live broadcast of Parliament Radio which Media Institute of Southern Africa...

The African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights (ACHPR) has expressed concern over reports on violations of freedom of expression and access to information in several African countries, including Zimbabwe. In her report to the 44th Session of the ACHPR in Abuja, Nigeria on November 13, advocate Pansy Tlakula, the ACHPR's Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression and Access to Information in...

Authorities in Zimbabwe should halt harassment of media and human rights lawyer Harrison Nkomo, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has demanded. Nkomo is awaiting word on whether he will face criminal charges after a client left Zimbabwe in the midst of a case, said Beatrice Mtetwa, co-founder of Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights. Nkomo was defending Phillip Taylor, a British national...

Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has condemned the arrests of Moussa Aksar, the editor-in-chief of the privately-owned weekly L'Evénement, and one of his journalists, Sani Aboubacar on a charge of libelling the head of the state power company. Their arrests on November 12 came a day after another newspaper editor got a three-month suspended sentence after 12 days in pre-trial custody. "What redress...

The state of fixed and mobile telephone networks in Zimbabwe is impeding freedom of expression in the country, the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA) has reported. The sole fixed telephone network, run by the state-owned company TelOne, is in an appalling state of affairs with erratic coverage in urban areas and is virtually non-existent in rural areas. This has inadvertently led to a major...

There has been a sharp rise in the number of media freedom violations in Zambia recorded during the just ended presidential by-election of October 30. During the pre and immediate post election period, between September and November 2008, there were 16 media freedom violations compared to six between January and August 2008, says the Zambia chapter of the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA)

The National Communications Council (CNC), the media regulatory body in Guinea, has ordered the management of Familia FM, a community radio station in Conakry, to cease transmission for allegedly broadcasting information that the CNC claimed could "disturb the public peace" of the country. The Media Foundation for West Africa's (MFWA) correspondent reported on November 4 that following the...