The adoption by the Belarus chamber of representatives of a media bill that would reinforce media registration procedures and, for the first time, extend media regulation to the Internet has free speech advocates a worried lot. The Belarus Association of Journalists (BAJ) had asked parliament’s human rights and media committee to examine whether articles 33 and 34 of the proposed new law violate...
A new broadcast law signed by Kyrgyzstan President Kurmanbek Bakiyev may threaten the future of a large number of news media outlets. The law, signed on June 4, gives the president the power to appoint the executive director of state-run TV and radio KTR. It also makes use of official languages partly compulsory as well as in-house production of programmes by the media. The president has however
A journalist won a legal test case over the confidentiality of reporters' contacts after judges ruled against a court order seeking all his notes for a biography of a former Islamist radical. The order had required London reporter Shiv Malik to give police all his notes and source material for a book he was writing on Hassan Butt, a British-born Muslim who spent 10 years inside radical Islamist...
For more than 40 years, the Mafia has been targeting journalists who try to expose the organisation's criminal activities, says an Italian media watchdog. In a new report, the Italian-based rights group Information Safety and Freedom (ISF) says that nine journalists have been murdered by the mafia since 1960, from Cosimo Cristina who was killed in Sicily in 1960 to Beppe Alfano in 1993. Many other
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has denounced repeated efforts by authorities in the southern Russian republic of Ingushetia to shut down the regional news website Ingushetiya—one of the few remaining independent news outlets covering the volatile North Caucasus—for alleged extremism. On June 6, Kuntsevo district court in Moscow ordered the closure of the website, alleging it contained...
Police in the Kyrgyz capital of Bishkek raided the newsroom of independent newspaper De-Facto on June 14, taking all its financial records, confiscating computers, and sealing the newsroom, the independent regional news website Ferghana has reported. The paper was shut down after it published a letter to Kyrgyzstan’s president and other public officials that alleged official corruption. The raid...
Three men have been charged for the killing of Russian journalist and Kremlin critic Anna Politkovskaya in 2006 but the actual assassin remains at large, investigators said on Wednesday, according to news reports. In a June 18 statement announcing the completion of the inquiry, the investigative committee of the Prosecutor-General's Office named the men accused of her assassination as Sergei...
The police in Unzbekistan has arrested an independent journalist in the city of Nukus for alleged drug possession, independent news website Uznews has reported. If convicted, Solidzhon Abdurakhmonov faces up to five years in prison, Uznews editor and CPJ International Press Freedom awardee Galima Bukharbaeva told the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Abdurakhmonov was...
A Moscow-based English language newspaper which poked fun at Russia and the West has closed after its backers stopped funding it, its editor said on Monday, according to Reuters. Officials from a Russian government agency responsible for the media visited the offices of the Exile on June 5 and took away copies for analysis, scaring investors who have withdrawn their support, editor Mark Ames told...
The Committee to Protect Journalists has expressed outrage at the the police beating of Emin Huseynov, head of the Institute for Reporters’ Freedom and Safety (IRFS), in Baku, Azerbaijan, on June 14. Huseynov was covering an event for the 80th birthday of slain Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara. Policed raided the event and took Huseynov to a police station where he was isolated, interrogated...
