A talk show host on Trinidad and Tobago’s public broadcaster, Caribbean New Media Group (CNMG), was taken off his programme earlier this month after a challenging interview with Foreign Affairs Minister Suruj Rambachan over Prime Minister Kamla Persad–Bissessar’s handling of aid to Caribbean countries affected by Hurricane Tomas in late October. On November 7, two days after the morning television...
Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has condemned the latest proceedings that Croatian interior minister Tomislav Karamarko has initiated against journalist Zeljko Peratovic, the target of repeated legal actions by the minister during past two years accusing him variously of defamation, violating the confidentiality of a judicial investigation and divulging information...
A “repugnant” defamation conviction has been handed down by a Moscow court to the independent weekly The New Times for a report into police corruption and abuse, according to Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). The verdict, obtained through false testimony, nullified the newspaper’s solid, truthful investigation headlined “OMON slaves” – in reference to the OMON riot...
Two journalists from the Moscow-based broadcast outlet Russia Today were arrested on November 20 while covering a protest against the US military training centre formerly known as the "School of the Americas" at Fort Benning, Georgia. On-air correspondent Kaelyn Forde and cameraman Jon Conway, both of who are US citizens, were charged with unlawful assembly, demonstrating without a permit, and...
A one-year prison sentence was imposed on Mohammed Abdulqader al-Jassem, a Kuwaiti writer and journalist, on Monday. A criminal court convicted al-Jassem of criminal defamation in connection with an article he published on his personal news blog, Al-Mizan. The case is only one of 18 that the government has filed against the journalist in the past year, the New York-based Committee to Protect...
Turkey continues to abuse its anti-terrorism law to censor and punish journalists who raise the issue of its Kurdish minority or quote certain Kurdish leaders. Use of the law to prosecute journalists has increased since it was amended in 2006. Under article 7/2 of the law, propaganda on behalf of a terrorist organisation is punishable by imprisonment. As neither “propaganda” nor “terrorist...
Abdou Latif Coulibaly, one of Senegal’s most prominent journalists and writers, and two of the journalists who work with him on his weekly newspaper, La Gazette, have been fined 20 million CFA francs (30,000 euros) and given one-month suspended jail sentences in a libel case about alleged kickbacks in the allocation of a mobile phone licence. The much-awaited sentence – issued on November 16, two...
Reporter Nqobani Ndlovu remained in police custody on Thursday despite expectations that he would appear in court on criminal defamation charges, local journalists told New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Police in Zimbabwe's second largest city, Bulawayo, arrested Ndlovu, a reporter for the private weekly Standard, on Wednesday and charged him with criminal defamation in...
Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has called for the withdrawal of bill which is about to be submitted to parliament and which would allow the authorities to block public access to official documents including judicial decisions, new legislation and public records. Announced on October 22 and called the “General Law Amendment Bill,” the proposed law’s sole aim seems...
A Singapore court Tuesday sentenced British writer Alan Shadrake to six weeks in prison and a fine for 20,000 Singapore dollars (11,320 euros) for criticising the country’s use of the death penalty in his book Once a Jolly Hangman: Singapore Justice in the Dock. Failure to pay the fine would add two weeks to his sentence. Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) deplored the...
