Europe - Central Asia

Vasyl Klymentyev, chief editor and reporter for the Kharkiv-based weekly newspaper Novyi Stil (New Style) has been missing for a week, New York-based press freedom group Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has reported. According to local news reports, on August 11, Klymentyev was seen leaving his home in the city of Kharkiv, in eastern Ukraine, with an unknown man in a BMW. The reports did not...

After Iceland's near-economic collapse laid bare deep-seated corruption, the country aims to become a safe haven for journalists and whistleblowers from around the globe by creating the world's most far-reaching freedom of information legislation, says an Agence France-Presse (AFP) report. The project, developed with the help of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, flies in the face of a growing...

Harassment of the Belarusian press has been on the upswing in the run-up to the presidential election that has been scheduled for next spring. What with the information ministry's repeated warnings, police raids, tax inspections and the country's new media law, press freedom is now severely compromised in Belarus. After receiving a series of information ministry warnings, two leading opposition...

Lisbon-based weekly Sol has been fined 1.5 million euros for defying a court injunction obtained by Rui Pedro Soares, the Portuguese government's former representative on the board of the national telecommunications company Portugal Telecom, not to publish details from phone conversations recorded in a police surveillance operation. Soares obtained the injunction on February 11 in response to a...

Jake Hess, an American freelance journalist who writes for Inter Press Service (IPS), was arrested on August 11 in the mainly Kurdish city of Diyarbakir, in southeastern Turkey, and is currently being held at the headquarters of the city’s anti-terrorist unit. Accused of links with the Union of Kurdistan Communities (KSK), a new organisation that is alleged to be an offshoot of the outlawed...

Trumped-up charges of extremism have been pressed in Kyrgyzstan against Ulugbek Abdusalomov, the editor of an independent newspaper, and Azimjon Askarov, a journalist and human rights defender, according to press freedom group Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Prosecutors in the southern city of Jalal-Abad charged Abdusalomov, editor of the Uzbek-language newspaper Diydor, and Askarov, head...

Reporter Ivonu Ramadzu and cameraman Kresimira Morica of national radio and TV station HRT were attcked on August 5 while they were covering celebrations marking the 15th anniversary of Operation Oluja, a major military victory for Croatia in the Yugoslav Wars. The TV crew went to the village of Čavoglave, the birthplace of controversial singer Marko “Thompson” Perković, where his ultranationalist...

The Russian interior ministry has carried out raids on news media and journalists as part of its investigation into an attack on an administrative building in Khimki, a satellite town on Moscow’s northern outskirts, by hundreds of protesters on the night of July 28, Paris-based Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. Representatives of the interior ministry’s Moscow region investigating...

Nearly five years after publication of the Mohammed cartoons, the threat of reprisals against the newspaper that carried them remains significant enough that it has constructed a security fence around its buildings, the Copenhagen Post has reported. The Viby, Jutland-based Jyllands-Posten took the advice of domestic intelligence agency PET and encircled its offices with a kilometer long metal...

The property of the television and radio company Chornomorska, which is the main mass media outlet of the Crimean opposition, has been seized, according to the "Ukrayinska Pravda" online edition. The building that houses the editorial office and videotape recording studio, as well as the office of the ASsol radio station, cars and all other belongings regardless of their location are to be seized...