Ethics and Freedom

A former USA Today reporter who was ordered to pay hefty fines starting at midnight Tuesday for refusing to name confidential sources for a story, has been granted a stay, Agence France-Presse (AFP) has reported quoting court sources. "It is ordered that the motion for a stay pending appeal be granted," a clerk at a US court of appeals in Washington told AFP, reading from the order. "Appellant has...

Journalists in Sierra Leone are challenging laws that criminalise free speech and authorise prison terms of up to seven years for those who criticise the government. The Sierra Leone Association of Journalists (SLAJ) filed the lawsuit with the country's Supreme Court: last week, seeking to overturn Sierra Leone's criminal libel and false news laws. The laws allow prison sentences for expression...

The editor of a women’s rights magazine in Afghanistan was arrested in Iran on March 4 and continues to be held without charge. The Afghan Independent Journalists’ Association (AIJA) has reported that Ali Mohaqiq Nasab, editor of the monthly Haqoq-e-Zan (Women’s Rights) magazine, was reportedly detained by Iranian officials in Qumm, near the Iranian capital Tehran. Documents, phones and a computer...

A federal judge in Washington has ordered a journalist to pay up to $5,000 a day if she continues to refuse to reveal her sources, acording to the Associated Press (AP). US District Judge Reggie Walton ruled that former USA Today reporter Toni Locy must pay the fines starting midnight on Tuesday next. The first week she is required to pay $500 a day, $1,000 a day for the second week and $5,000 a...

Two years after a court imposed a news blackout on a terrorism case that includes charges of a plot to storm Canada's parliament, several media organisations have asked an appeals court to lift ban. Lawyers for the Associated Press (AP), the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, CTV television, and the Toronto Star appealed the blackout before Ontario's Court of Appeal earlier this week. They argued...

Blasphemy laws are on their way out of the United Kingdom (UK). The House of Lords voted Wednesday night in favour of abolishing the criminal offences of blasphemy and blasphemous libel from the common law. By a vote of 148-87, the lawmakers adopted Amendment 144B to the government-sponsored Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill. The full Bill has not yet received final approval from parliament...

Press freedom violations marred Russia’s presidential election on March 2, according to Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). “The incidents that occurred during the election are indicative of the nervousness that the authorities feel towards independent journalists,” Paris-based RSF said in a statement. In South Sakhalin, reporter Pavel Abakumov of the weekly Yuzhno Sakhalinsk Tvoya Gazeta was...

Chad is now one of the few African countries without an effective independent press since a state of emergency was declared on February 15. Journalists are fleeing abroad to escape arrest or falling silent in protest against censorship and "very serious" official threats. And now, with the adoption of a new press law by decree instead of abolishing prison sentences for press offences, it makes

The Belarusian Supreme Court has ordered the early release of Aleksandr Sdvizhkov, former deputy editor of the now-shuttered independent newspaper Zgoda, who was sentenced in January to three years in a high-security prison for reprinting controversial Danish cartoons of the prophet Mohammed in 2006. “We’re relieved at the Belarusian Supreme Court’s decision to grant early release to Aleksandr...

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) today called on Belarus’s Supreme Court to overturn a ruling that found Aliaksandar Zdzvizhkou, former deputy editor of Zhoda newspaper guilty of inciting religious hatred for re-printing the Danish caricatures of the prophet Mohammed in 2006. “This prosecution is an attack on press freedom that the government has tried to disguise by claiming...