Ethics and Freedom

After Iceland's near-economic collapse laid bare deep-seated corruption, the country aims to become a safe haven for journalists and whistleblowers from around the globe by creating the world's most far-reaching freedom of information legislation, says an Agence France-Presse (AFP) report. The project, developed with the help of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, flies in the face of a growing...

Harassment of the Belarusian press has been on the upswing in the run-up to the presidential election that has been scheduled for next spring. What with the information ministry's repeated warnings, police raids, tax inspections and the country's new media law, press freedom is now severely compromised in Belarus. After receiving a series of information ministry warnings, two leading opposition...

Lisbon-based weekly Sol has been fined 1.5 million euros for defying a court injunction obtained by Rui Pedro Soares, the Portuguese government's former representative on the board of the national telecommunications company Portugal Telecom, not to publish details from phone conversations recorded in a police surveillance operation. Soares obtained the injunction on February 11 in response to a...

Venezuelan prosecutors are investigating El Nacional newspaper after it published a front-page photograph of corpses piled up at a morgue in the capital Caracas, the government said on Saturday, according to local and international news reports. There were 11 dead bodies -- including a child and most of them naked -- in the colour photograph under a Friday headline about deteriorating security in...

Jake Hess, an American freelance journalist who writes for Inter Press Service (IPS), was arrested on August 11 in the mainly Kurdish city of Diyarbakir, in southeastern Turkey, and is currently being held at the headquarters of the city’s anti-terrorist unit. Accused of links with the Union of Kurdistan Communities (KSK), a new organisation that is alleged to be an offshoot of the outlawed...

The Lebanese army intelligence department detained journalist Hassan Alleik, a reporter for the Al-Akhbar newspaper, and questioned him for six hours on August 11 about an article published in the newspaper the previous day, according to press freedom group Maharat Foundatin. The article was about the escape of an agent named Ghassan El Jed, who was previously accused by Hezbollah secretary...

Security forces, police officers and members of the Asayesh intelligence service harassed a group of journalists on August 11 in Chamchamal, a town located between Sulaymaniyah and Kirkuk, in Iraqi Kurdistan, and even fired at one of them, according to Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). The journalists were covering a protest against a water shortage in the town. The...

A Zimbabwean minister who threatened to jail journalists who used information he said had been leaked from cabinet meetings, according to New York-based press freedom group Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Information Minister Webster Shamu made the threat on August 4. Shamu said that journalists and ministers could face jail sentences of up to 20 years under the 1970 Official Secrets Act...

Burundian authorities freed the director of a weekly publication arrested this week on defamation charges, the journalist said Friday. Thierry Ndayishimiye, the director of the Arc-en-ciel weekly, was released on Thursday, two days after he was detained over an article in which he accused the director of the national water and electricity firm of trying to cover up embezzlement of $110,000....

France condemned the behaviour of one of its own military officers on Thursday, after a video appeared online showing him threatening a Togolese press photographer in Lome, Agence France-Presse (AFP) has reported. The officer, a serving French colonel employed by the foreign ministry as an advisor to the Togolese military, is seen ordering the journalist to erase pictures from his camera and...