Ethics and Freedom

Odnei Fernando da Silva, the civilian police inspector who is accused of heading the militia that kidnapped and tortured two O Dia journalists and their driver in Rio de Janeiro's Batan favela on May 14, surrendered to the authorities on June 16. Also known as "01", "Dinei" and "Águia", Da Silva went with his lawyer to the headquarters of the Department for Repression of Criminal Actions and...

The main owner of Armenian-Turkish newspaper Agos and the daily's editor have been acquitted of charges of “trying to obstruct a fair trial” by publishing an editorial that criticised the one-year suspended prison sentences imposed on three of its journalists. Serkis Seropyan, the main owner of Agos and editor Aris Nalci were Wednesday acquitted by a criminal court in the Istanbul district of...

The adoption by the Belarus chamber of representatives of a media bill that would reinforce media registration procedures and, for the first time, extend media regulation to the Internet has free speech advocates a worried lot. The Belarus Association of Journalists (BAJ) had asked parliament’s human rights and media committee to examine whether articles 33 and 34 of the proposed new law violate...

The conviction for “electoral propaganda” against daily A Folha de São Paulo and magazine Veja after they published interviews with a prospective candidate to municipal elections in São Paulo in southeast Brazil has been described as "absurd". Paris-based Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) said Thursday that the verdict placed an unacceptable limit on press freedom and that reform of the current...

The Canadian Journalists for Free Expression (CJFE) has expressed concern at the court decision allowing police to use photographs belonging to the Hamilton Spectator. Officers executed a search warrant on May 6, 2008, in order to obtain photos of a highway blockade in Caledonia. Brian Rogers, representing the Hamilton Spectator, was in court on June 12 to fight the issuing of the warrant, but his...

A journalist won a legal test case over the confidentiality of reporters' contacts after judges ruled against a court order seeking all his notes for a biography of a former Islamist radical. The order had required London reporter Shiv Malik to give police all his notes and source material for a book he was writing on Hassan Butt, a British-born Muslim who spent 10 years inside radical Islamist...

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has denounced repeated efforts by authorities in the southern Russian republic of Ingushetia to shut down the regional news website Ingushetiya—one of the few remaining independent news outlets covering the volatile North Caucasus—for alleged extremism. On June 6, Kuntsevo district court in Moscow ordered the closure of the website, alleging it contained...

Three years on, the Danish cartoon wars just won't rub out. Governments are stoking the crisis by instigating protests against the cartoonists or the newspapers that dared to report on the controversy, the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) and other IFEX members have found. Cartoonists and journalists from the Arab world, Europe and the US say that the Danish cartoon crisis is being

The Algerian government is becoming increasingly intolerant of criticism. The communications ministry stripped the Agence France-Presse (AFP) bureau chief and the Reuters correspondent in Algiers of their accreditation on June 10, and a court fined the daily Liberté's publisher and editor and one of its cartoonists for defamation on June 16. "The lack of tolerance for outspoken journalists has...

The 2005 shooting death of a Reuters journalist in the midst of a firefight in Baghdad was justified because US soldiers believed the camera protruding from an unmarked car was a rocket propelled grenade, the Pentagon's internal watchdog has concluded. In an 82-page report, the Defense Department's inspector general also said that Reuters safety practices contributed to the death of sound...