Ethics and Freedom

Newspaper editor Raphaël Nkamtcheun has been detained for the past week for receiving allegedly confidential government documents from former finance minister Polycarpe Abah Abah when he visited Abah in Yaoundé prison on February 17. Abah has been jailed since 2008 on an embezzlement charge. “This is an arbitrary act designed to silence the press,” Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans...

Andrzej Poczobut, a Grodno correspondent for the largest Polish daily, Gazeta Wyborcza, has been sentenced to prison. According to reports in the local press, the Oktyabrsky District Court in Minsk sentenced Poczobut to 15 days in jail on charges of "participation in the unsanctioned protest rally" that followed the December 19 presidential elections. Poczobut covered the protests for Gazeta...

A former Israeli soldier who leaked secret military documents to a journalist suggesting that the army had ignored a court ruling in carrying out targeted assassinations of West Bank militants faces years in prison. Anat Kamm, who was held under secret house arrest for four months before her case was made public, pleaded guilty yesterday to the possession and distribution of classified documents...

Taghi Rahmani, a veteran independent journalist and staunch free speech activist, was picked up at his Tehran home on Wednesday by men in plain-clothes and was taken to an unknown location, Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. At the same time, several journalists and bloggers have been summoned for questioning by the Revolutionary Guards and the...

Laurent Gbagbo’s government in Côte d’Ivoire has launched a crackdown on the media, according to Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). The leadership of the National Press Council (CNP), which regulates the print media, has just been replaced by Gbagbo’s supporters. The UN radio station, Onuci FM, has had its permit withdrawn. And many journalists are still exposed to...

The regional bimonthly Tribune d’Afrique’s appeal hearing opened Thursday in Lomé but was immediately adjourned at the request of the lawyers representing Mey Gnassingbé, the president’s half-brother and a member of the president’s office, who brought a successful libel suit against the publication last year. Accepting the claims of Mey Gnassingbé’s lawyers that they had not had enough time to...

Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has urged Florida’s new Governor, Rick Scott, to explain his handling of the media since he has been brought into office on January 4, 2011. RSF is worried that his media policy has been skirting with press freedoms. For example, during his post-inauguration ceremony, on the 22nd Floor of The Capitol, Scott carefully “cherry-picked”...

Yet another Burmese journalist has been given a long jail term, according to Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) and Burma Media Association (BMA). A Rangoon court sentenced video reporter Maung Maung Zeya on February 4 to five years in prison for two violations of the Unlawful Association Act, one year under the Immigration Act (for crossing the border illegally) and...

Influential radio and TV anchor Carmen Aristegui was suddenly fired by the MVS media group on February 6, two days after referring in her weekday news programme on radio MVS and cable channel Canal 52 to claims by opposition legislators that President Felipe Calderón has an alcohol problem, according to Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). “The speed with which she was...

Gustavo Azócar, a journalist based in the western Venezuelan state of Táchira who has been prosecuted with varying degrees of success in the past, appeared on February 7 before a Táchira court again on a charge of libelling an army officer in 2004, when one of his jobs was correspondent for the national daily El Universal. A new hearing has been set for March 15, according to Paris-based press...