Asia

LAUSANNE, Switzerland: The International Olympic Committee said Friday it expects Chinese authorities to give the media full freedom to report on the Beijing Games, responding to complaints from a media rights group. The group, Reporters Without Borders, said the IOC has remained silent while China clamps down on reporters during preparations for the Aug. 8-24 Olympics. "It is becoming clearer and...

Reporters Without Borders has greeted with relief the news that Riaz Mengal, a reporter with the newspaper "Intikhab", succeeded in escaping from kidnappers who abducted him on 4 October 2007 in the Khuzdar district of Baluchistan province. The journalist told a press conference in Quetta on 26 November, a day after his escape from his captors, that his "kidnapping was linked to articles about...

Reporters Without Borders has condemned the arrests of several dozen journalists to prevent them from covering a failed coup attempt at a Manila hotel where around 30 soldiers had demanded the ouster of President Gloria Arroyo on 29 November 2007. The journalists were taken, their hands bound, to the National Capital Region Police Office in Bicutan, south-east of the capital. Police said they had...

(RSF/IFEX) - RSF condemns the arrests of three foreign journalists and a Chinese camerawoman on 20 November 2007 in the northeastern province of Hebei and the central province of Hubei. "It is unacceptable that such practices are still taking place in China, despite the new regulations introduced in January for the Olympic Games," RSF said. Barbara Luthi, the Beijing correspondent of the Swiss...

The World Association of Newspapers (WAN) has called on all participants in next summer’s Beijing Olympics — the International Olympic Committee, athletes, sponsors and other partners — to "exert serious pressure" on China to hold the government to its promises of reform. A pedestrian walks past a banner promoting 2008 Olympic Games tickets in Beijing, April 2007. Massive demand caused the Beijing...

The law is being bend, moulded and used to curtail the freedom to express. Legal hurdles have been placed in Mongolia for reporters and whistleblowers. The findings have been highlighted in Protecting Journalists’ Confidential Sources and Repealing the Criminal Defamation Legislation, brought out by Globe International. The 'UB Post', Mongolia´s independent weekly English newspaper in Ulaanbaatar...

On October 7, 2006, after a six-month trial, the three hired assassins who killed Marlene Garcia-Esperat, a Filipino newspaper columnist and radio commentator who probed government corruption, were sentenced to life imprisonment. Marlene Garcia-Esperat was an accidental journalist. A chemist for the agriculture department on the southern island of Mindanao in the early 1990s, she was scrounging to...

On October 7, 2006, after a six-month trial, the three hired assassins who killed Marlene Garcia-Esperat, a Filipino newspaper columnist and radio commentator who probed government corruption, were sentenced to life imprisonment. Garcia-Esperat was gunned down in front of her children in the dining room of her home on March 24, 2005. She had received many threats and had requested police

The civil war, internal displacement, limited access to information and restrictions on journalists’ freedom of movement have proved to be great obstacles to press freedom in Sri Lanka, particularly in the country’s eastern provinces. These are some of the findings of the fact-finding mission by representatives of the International Press Institute (IPI), the International Federation of

She is a fearless journalist, she has endured numerous death threats because of her uncompromising professionalism, and her journey to bring out the truth has been the full of roadblocks. Yet, the passion doesn’t seem to die in the courageous Lydia Cacho Ribeiro, a 44-year-old Mexican journalist. Cacho received Courage Award by International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF) recently for her