Europe - Central Asia

The 2008 SEEMO Award for Human Rights has been awarded to Slovenian journalist, writer and human rights advocate Spomenka Hribar. The award is given by the Vienna-based South East Europe Media Organisation (SEEMO), a network of editors, media executives and leading journalists in South East Europe and an affiliate of the International Press Institute (IPI). Hribar received much publicity in the...

Nazif Iflasoglu, a reporter from the daily Radikal, has been acquitted of the accusation of "securing and spreading secret documents". He had faced the charges for publishing an article about the strategy of the Follow-Up Committee at the Prime Ministry regarding its fight against the radical Muslim Hizbullah Organization, the Istanbul-based IPS Communication Foundation (BIANET) has reported. The...

A controversial businessman has been arrested in Bulgarian for blackmailing a journalist and assaulting her son. The Sofia District Prosecutor's Office has ordered a businessman from the town of Dupnitsa, Plamen Galev, his accountant Krasimir Okov and his bodyguard Georgi Gradevski, to be detained, the prosecutor's office said on Friday, according to Sofia News Agency. Galev and Okov have been...

Citing the examination of “classified” material evidence, the presiding judge in the Anna Politkovskaya murder case trial again barred on Thursday the press and public from the hearing. The trial was re-opened for both on Friday. A witness testifying in the trial said on Friday that a bounty of $2 million was paid to carry out the killing. Lom-Ali Gaitukayev, who had previously served 12 years in...

The Kazakh government's human rights record, including free speech issues, is inconsistent with standards embraced by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), whose chairmanship the former is to take over in 2010. This, says Human rights Watch, risks undermining the integrity of the institution's human rights principles. One of the key problem areas is the government's rigid

The Newsquest-owned Herald and Times group in Scotland has made all its 250 journalists and publishing staff redundant and asked them to re-apply for their jobs. The Glasgow-based company, which publishes the Herald, Sunday Herald and Evening Times announced this on December 3, according to the Scotsman newspaper. About 30-40 staff, 17 per cent of journalists, are expected to be cut as the company...

A 13-year prison sentence has been imposed by a prosecutor on Haci Bogatekin, owner and editor of Turkish fortnightly Gerger Firat for an article accusing another local prosecutor of bias. A four-and-a-half-year sentence was also requested for the editor of a website that posted the article, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. Bogatekin’s December 2 court appearance was the seventh time...

A bomb exploded Wednesday at the Agence France-Presse (AFP) office in Athens causing minor damage but no injuries, the international news agency said. An underground group labelled as anarchist by Greek police claimed responsibility. The bomb, made up of four small gas cannisters, was placed at the front door to the office on the fifth floor of a block in the centre of the Greek capital. It...

An independent Kazakh journalist is being continually harassed by the country's National Security Committee (KNB), which wants him to reveal how he obtained an internal KNB memo. The harassment led Ramazan Esergepov to seek refuge inside the US consulate in Almaty. “The pressure applied to Esergepov was out of all proportion,” Reporters sans Frontières said. “KNB should track down the source of...

The treatment meted out by the French police to Vittorio de Filippis, former managing editor of leftwing daily Libération, has prompted widespread condemnation and furore. Filippis was manhandled, handcuffed, humiliated in front of his sons, twice forced to strip and submit to body cavity searches and interrogated without lawyers by an investigating magistrate— all over a two-year-old libel case...