West Asia - North Africa

Four Azeri journalists have been held without charge for more than 10 days, possibly in Tehran's Evin prison, while an Azeri journalist and blogger was sentenced to six months in prison on September 20 for her online articles, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. "These Azeris join the list of ethnic minority journalists held in Iran's prisons for criticising social inequality and...

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has pardoned outspoken editor Ibrahim Eissa from the two-month jail sentence the latter received for “publishing false information of a nature to disturb public order or security,” state-TV announced late Monday. An Egyptian appeals court on September 28 upheld a guilty verdict against Eissa who wrote stories questioning President Mubarak's health. Eissa, editor of...

The Iraqi Ministry of Interior has launched investigations into cases of 48 media personnel who were either killed or subjected to acts of violence, according to the director of the ministry's National Command Centre, Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA) has reported. Some details: "Investigations have been launched following the establishment of a partnership with the Journalistic Freedoms Observatory...

An Egyptian appeals court has upheld a guilty verdict against newspaper editor Ibrahim Eissa who wrote stories questioning president Hosni Mubarak's health. Eissa, editor of the independent daily Al-Dustour, was sentenced Sunday to two months imprisonment. Eissa was originally convicted in March and sentenced to six months on charges of reporting and publishing "false" information that questioned...

Leading Yemen journalist Abdel Karim al-Khaiwani has been released from prison shortly after President Ali Abdullah Saleh granted him amnesty and ordered cancellation of his six-year jail sentence that was handed to him earlier for conspiring with anti-government rebels. After leaving prison, al-Khaiwani told the News Yemen website that his release "is a victory for all Yemeni journalists and...

Israeli journalists have spoken out against restrictions on freedom of movement facing reporters in Palestine and proposed a joint forum with Palestinian colleagues to deal with a range of problems facing media and journalists in the region. In a meeting with a delegation from the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) in Jerusalem recently leaders of the Jerusalem Association of...

Ossayd Amarneh, a cameraman employed by Al-Aqsa TV, the mouthpiece of the Islamic party Hamas, was arrested in the West Bank city of Bethlehem on September 21, according to Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). It is the fourth time Amarneh has been arrested in the past 12 months. The Palestinian Authority security services constant harass Al-Aqsa journalists in order to rein in Hamas’s propaganda and...

Iraq's largely autonomous northern Kurdistan region has passed a modified media law aimed at protecting journalists' rights, abolishing jail terms for offences such as defamation, Reuters has reported quoting parliamentary deputies. An earlier version of the law passed by parliament last December carried tough sanctions for journalists including imprisonment, fines of up to 10 million Iraqi dinar...

A top Saudi cleric has issued an edict saying writers who challenge or criticise religious sheikhs should be fired from their jobs, flogged, and jailed. This comes close on the heels of another top cleric calling for the death of owners of satellite TV stations that air “immoral” soap operas. Sheikh Abdallah Ben Jabreen, a former member of the Saudi Arabia’s Establishment of Fatwas, told Al-Majd...

A bomb blast outside Iraq's national journalists' union in central Baghdad wounded the union's head and three others on Saturday. The explosion apparently targeting Muaid al-Lami, head of the Iraqi Journalists' Syndicate, caused no deaths, news agencies reported. Reuters reported: "Some vehicles outside caught fire and it shattered all the glass in the building," union member Hassan al-Aboudi, who...