Corruption and Crime

Stalina Gurevich, lawyer for newspaper editor Mikhail Beketov, who was attacked and brutally beaten on November 13, has announced a reward for information on those who instigated or carried out the attack and condemned lack of progress in the investigation. She joined Andrei Stolbunov, vice-president of the human rights organisation Spravedlivost (Justice) in offering a reward of 500,000 roubles...

There has been a wave of attacks since the beginning of the month on Italian journalists working in Rome, in what seems to be a new campaign of intimidation by far-right groups. A TV crew from state-owned RAI-1’s news programme, TG1, was harassed on Sunday while doing a report in the Rome suburb of Il Trullo about racist attacks on immigrants by young Italians. The report followed the arrests of...

Adolfo Cerrudo, a leader of the radical pro-government Popular Civic Committees, alleged to have taken part in physical assaults on journalists, has been placed under house arrest since November 14. Cerrudo took part in physical assaults, along with 200 other committee members, against a score of journalists outside San Pedro de La Paz prison, who were there to cover the investigation into the...

The family of journalist Luiz Carlos Barbon Filho are being harassed a year and a half after he was murdered in Porto Ferreira, in the Brazilian state of São Paulo. There are concerns that this is linked to their participation in the investigation of the crime perpetrated on him. After Barbon was murdered on May 5, their house was attacked and his widow, Kátia Rosa Camargo, received several silent...

The European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) has accused the German Football Federation of launching an unfair campaign of distortion and lies against a journalist who has criticised its President, Theo Zwanziger, one of the country's leading sports officials. Jens Weinreich, an investigative journalist with Berliner Zeitung, is a specialist in the area of international politics of sports who has...

A newspaper reporter has been imprisoned for two months after having been detained by military personnel when he was on his way to cover a confrontation between opposing gangs of suspected drug traffickers in Arcelia, Guerrero, southern Mexico. According to national and Guerrero-based media outlets, on September 6 a group of approximately 30 men from Mexico State arrived in Guerrero and entered...

The recent spurt in attacks against journalists in Mexico has press freedom groups extremely worried. Paris-based Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has called on US border authorities to make the necessary humanitarian provisions for journalists who are being forced to flee into exile. In particular, it requested the immediate release of Mexican journalist Emilio Gutiérrez Soto—held in the Texan...

An Armenian journalist known for writing stories exposing government corruption has been attacked and beaten by unknown assailants, the seventh such incident in the country this year, Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) has reported. Edik Baghdasarian, an award-winning investigative reporter who runs the Yerevan-based online magazine Hetq, said he had left his office in downtown Yerevan at...

The Jornal Atual newspaper, based in the inland town of Itaguaí in Brazil's Rio de Janeiro state, has suffered a significant reduction in its distribution. According to the newspaper's owner, Marcelo Godinho, 15 street newsstand vendors have refused since November 6 to put the newspaper out for sale to their customers. All of the newsstands in question belong to the same owner, known as "Rodolfo"...

A Filipino broadcast journalist was killed Monday in the southern Philippines, news reports said quoting police sources. Aresio Padrigao, a commentator for local radio station DXRS, was shot dead by gunmen aboard a motorcycle in Gingoog town in Misamis Oriental province, 795 km south of Manila. Padrigao is the fourth journalist to be killed in the Philippines this year. Last year, four journalists...