The Azerbaijan police Saturday raided an event organised by the "Che Guevera Fan Club" to mark the 80th birthday of Che Guevera, according to the Institute for Reporter Freedom and Safety (IRFS). Of the 25 people present, 20 were detained by police and taken to Nasimi District Police Department #22. Among those detained were IRFS Chairman Emin Huseynov and IRFS researchers Rasim Aliyev and...
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s cabinet Friday unanimously approved a bill that would restrict the use of phone taps to investigations of crimes carrying prison terms of at least 10 years and would impose heavy fines or jail terms on journalists and news media that publish transcripts of phone taps without a judge’s permission. “There would seem to be ulterior motives to this bill as it...
Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) voiced alarm Friday about a programme broadcast by state television stations Namangan TV and Ferghana TV on June 10 that attacked Radio Free Europe (RFE), a US-funded international radio station based in Prague, and gave the addresses of its Uzbek correspondents and the schools attended by their children. “We are extremely disturbed by this smear campaign against...
The Committee to Protect Journalists has expressed concern over the June 7 arrest of Solidzhon Abdurakhmonov, an independent Uzbek journalist for a number of international news outlets. Police arrested Abdurakhmonov in the city of Nukus for alleged drug possession, independent news website Uznews reported. If convicted, Abdurakhmonov faces up to five years in prison, Uznews editor and CPJ...
(Glasnost Defence Foundation): Larissa Yudina, editor-in-chief of the newspaper "Sovetskaya Kalmykia Segodnya" (SKS), was killed in Elista, capital of the Republic of Kalmykia, on 7 June 1998. For several years prior to the murder, attempts were made to close down Kalmykia's sole independent newspaper. Yudina had been unlawfully dismissed and steps had been taken to get the staff out into the...
Prison authorities have seized the 300-page manuscript of a book Azadlig newspaper editor-in-chief Ganimat Zahid was trying to write while in Bayil prison #1, where he remains a prisoner, the Baku-based Institute for Reporter Freedom and Safety (IRFS) has reported. The public relations coordinator of the Justice Ministry's Penitentiary Service, Mehman Sadigov, claims the confiscation is legal. "I...
The appointment of French President Nicolas Sarkozy's alleged ex-girlfriend to the country's most prestigious TV news position has taken the country's media landscape by storm. Fortyone-year-old Laurence Ferrari is to replace France's most popular and influential news reader, Patrick Poivre d'Arvor, as the host of France's most-watched news programme, the evening news on TF1. Liberation and Le...
The European Court of Human Rights has found Greece guilty of violating freedom of expression by convicting the daily I Avgi and its editor, Konstantinos Karis, of libel in 2003 for describing former journalist Kyriakos Velopoulos as a “known out-an-out nationalist” in a June 2000 article, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. Velopoulos, who was elected last year as a parliamentary...
There have been new developments in the investigation into the 1997 death of Jean-Pascal “JPK” Couraud, a leading investigative journalist based in Papeete, the capital of French Polynesia. According to a report on Le Monde’s website on June 6, the Papeete judge now in charge of the case, Jean-François Redonnet, searched the Paris headquarters of the General Directorate for External Security (DGSE...
Five kilos of explosive were set off early Sunday outside the daily El Correo’s premises in Zamudio, in Spain’s northern Basque region, destroying an external wall but not injuring any of the 50 employees inside. The Basque armed separatist group Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) is suspected to have been behind the incident. El Correo deputy editor José Miguel Santamaria told Paris-based Reporters sans...
