West Asia - North Africa

Kuwaiti Prime Minister Nasser AlAhmad AlSabah has filed a complaint against Ibrahim Eissa, editor of Egyptian daily Al-Dustour and Kuwaiti journalist Mohammed Alweshaihi accusing them of insult and libel. Lately, Al-Dustour had reported on the trials of Kuwaiti journalist Mohamed AlJassim, and slammed the Kuwaiti PM for being behind them, the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI) has...

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has accused the authorities in Tunisia of engaging in a "relentless campaign" of intimidation and harassment of a journalists' leader. IFJ says Zied-el-Heni, a member of the leadership of the Syndicat national des journalistes tunisiens (SNJT) and of the steering committee of the African Federation of Journalistes (FAJ), the IFJ regional group, is...

Tunisian journalist Fahem Boukadous has been in extremely poor health since police arrested him on July 15 to begin serving a four-year jail sentence for covering protests in the Gafsa mining region in the spring of 2008 for the international satellite TV station El Hiwar Ettounsi. Boukadous, who suffers from acute asthma attacks and was undergoing medical tests when police arrested him, is being...

Tunisian authorities have in the past few days stepped up their harassment of journalists who dare to criticise the government and defend freedom of expression. Poet and journalist Taoufik Ben Brik has been under house arrest for the past few days, after writing two articles for the French newspaper Nouvel Observateur about Tunisia’s police state. A permanent cordon of plain-clothes police is...

Monday's bombing of Al Arabiya's Baghdad office brought the death toll of the channel's employees to 15 since the start of the war in Iraq in 2003. Four people were killed and 15 were injured on Monday when a suicide bomber detonated a 120kg bomb in a van outside Al Arabiya's Baghdad office at 9.25am Baghdad time. According to the Iraq-based Journalism Freedom Observatory, a total of 249 media...

A jailed Iranian journalist has warned that if his complaint against Iran's supreme leader, president, and chief prosecutor is not pursued he will appeal to international bodies, RFE/RL's Radio Farda has reported. Isa Saharkhiz said in an open letter on July 25 that if the head of Iran's judiciary, Ayatollah Sadeq Larijani, did not take action on his grievance in the coming month he would take his...

Abdolreza Tajik, an Iranian journalist and member of the member of the Human Rights Defenders Centre, has been the victim of mistreatment since his arrest on June 23. Relatives say that when they visited him for the first time in Evin prison on July 14, he told them he had been victim of violence in the presence of the Tehran deputy prosecutor-general during his first night in prison, according to...

The Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia has taken credit for Monday's bombing at the Al Arabiya office in Baghdad on a website it often uses to communicate, suggesting the attack was in response to a broadcast about the influence of the extremist group. The programme was called “Creation of Death.” “Wait for more,” the group’s statement said. The capabilities of the group, which is homegrown but is believed...

Iran has sentenced award-winning journalist Emadeddin Baghi to a year in prison and banned him from political activities for five years, an opposition website has reported. Baghi, who is also a well-known human rights activist, has been "sentenced to one year in prison and banned from political activities for five years after a two-year trial for forming a group defending the rights of prisoners,"...

Four persons were killed and 10 others injured in Baghdad on Monday when a suicide bomber blew up a vehicle by the offices of Al Arabiya, its correspondent in Baghdad and interior ministry officials said. The bomber struck at around 9:30 am (0630 GMT) in front of the station's bureau in the city centre, leaving a massive crater and sending a plume of smoke into the air that could be seen from...