West Asia - North Africa

There has been a wave of lawsuits against independent Iraqi news media in recent weeks. Three daily newspapers and a TV station have so far been sued for defamation by senior government officials over reports about corruption, according to Paris-based Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). “These attacks on independent Iraqi media run counter to the progress towards democracy which the entire nation has...

Paris-based Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has condemned Monday morning’s decision by the Israeli internal security ministry to shut down the Palestinian media centre that had been set up in the East Jerusalem district of Sheikh Jarrah in advance of the Pope’s visit. The media centre was a temporary one that had been installed in a conference room of the Hotel Ambassador to provide documentation...

Freelance journalist Roxana Saberi has been released from prison in Iran. Saberi, who was initially sentenced to an eight-year prison term for espionage on April 18, was released from Tehran's Evin Prison Monday after an appeals court reduced her punishment to a two-year suspended sentence. Although exact details about the charges against Saberi remain unknown, BBC reported that the initial charge...

Amid an increasing crackdown on the media in Yemen, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has called for Yemeni authorities to disclose the whereabouts of a journalist who has been held incommunicado since May 4 after he was arrested in southern Yemen. CPJ also called on the authorities to drop a series of lawsuits against an independent critical newspaper. Security forces arrested Fuad...

Yemen has banned eight newspapers that have covered unrest in the southern part of the country, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has reported. Dozens of journalists gathered on May 7 in front of the country's press syndicate in the capital, Sana'a, to protest the government's decision to suspend the newspapers, the Associated Press reported. A similar demonstration was held in the...

There has been an alarming wave of politically motivated criminal lawsuits in Iraq's Kurdistan filed against mostly independent journalists as well as blatant violations of the region's new press law. The law has no provisions for jail terms for journalists, but journalists are still being imprisoned, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has reported. In a letter to the prime minister of the...

After confiscating thousands of copies of a critical independent newspaper, authorities laid siege on May 4 to the paper's offices in Aden, Yemen. The daily, Al-Ayyam, has been covering the ongoing conflict in the country's southern region. Bashraheel Bashraheel, general manager of Al-Ayyam, told CPJ that after three consecutive days of authorities confiscating thousands of copies of the newspaper...

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is closely following the imminent trial of two suspects who have been charged with plotting to murder Ahmed Mira, editor-in-chief of the Sulaymania, Iraq-based ‎magazine Livin. ‎Mira and his lawyer, Othman ‏Sidiq, told CPJ that investigations have been completed and that two ‏suspects have been formally charged with planning to murder Mira. The first...

Iranian-American freelance journalist Roxana Saberi, who was sentenced to eight years in prison by an Iranian Revolutionary Court on charges of spying for the United States, remains on a hunger strike that she started a week ago, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) Her father, Reza Saberi, told Agence France-Presse (AFP) after visiting her in Tehran's Evin Prison on her 32...

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has called on Syrian authorities to disclose the whereabouts of a journalist who has been held incommunicado since early April after he was ordered to visit the political security ‎‎office in Aleppo. Faruq Haji Mustafa, a Syrian Kurdish journalist and writer, was arrested on April 5 by political security ‎officers, according to the ‎‏Samir ‎Kassir...