Ethics and Freedom

The Belarus Information ministry on April 25 requested the Supreme Economic Court to shut down two prominent weekly newspapers, Nasha Niva and Narodnaya Volya, under article 51, subsection 2.2, of the mass media law. This article says that any media organization can be closed after receiving two warnings from the information ministry in a single year. “The closure of Nasha Niva and Narodnaya Volya...

Belarusian authorities must immediately stop harassing independent media outlets in retaliation for their critical reporting on the recent lethal bombing on the Minsk subway, New York-based press freedom group Community to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has demanded. Following the blast, authorities--including the Information Ministry, the general prosecutor's office, and the Belarusian security...

A dozen community radio stations linked to the opposition “Red Shirts” were shut down in a major police operation on April 26 in Bangkok and the surrounding provinces, according to Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). An exact list of the radio stations raided by the police is not yet available. “Coming just a few months before general elections, this crackdown is very...

The European Commission’s decision to investigate the impact on net neutrality of the practices of Internet Service Providers, especially those offering mobile phone access, has been taken too late and the basis on which the investigation is being initiated is wrong, Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has said. The press freedom organisation called on the Body of...

A federal appeals court in Philadelphia Tuesday ordered a new sentencing hearing for Afro-American journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, who has been under sentence of death since 1982 for the fatal shooting of a policeman. The court gave the state of Pennsylvania six months to select a jury and hold the hearing, or otherwise agree to a life sentence. The ruling increases hopes that the almost 30 years that...

The number of journalists in jail in Peru rose to two when Paul Garay Ramírez, a programme producer for Visión 47 TV and a correspondent for Radio La Exitosa, was sentenced to three years in prison by a court in the east-central region of Ucayali on April 19 for allegedly defaming a prosecutor. The other journalist currently detained is Oswaldo Pereyra Moreno of Radio Macarena, who was sentenced...

Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has condemned the two criminal defamation charges that have been brought against Alberto Loyola, a journalist with radio DxRJ in Iligan City (on the southern island of Mindanao), by local city councillor Chonilo Ruiz. Arrested on April 18, Loyola was released Tuesday on bail of 10,000 pesos (160 euros) after being held for nearly 48...

Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has condemned the way that Hata Wahari, the president of the National Union Of Journalists Malaysia (NUJ), is being treated by his newspaper, the Kuala Lumpur-based daily Utusan Malaysia. The newspaper is owned by the United Malays National Organization (UMNO), a political party that has played a dominant role in Malaysia since...

The European Federation of Journalists (EFJ), the European group of the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), has expressed its concerns over restructurings and downsizing taking place in major public broadcasters in Europe. "Within a couple of weeks it was announced that the three major international public broadcasters in Europe, BBC World Service, RFI-France 24 and Deutsche Welle, will...

Many opposition and news websites have fallen victim to distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) in the run-up to Saturday’s election in Malaysia’s eastern state of Sarawak (on the island of Borneo), which is posing a challenge to Chief Minister Abdul Taib Mahmud’s 30-year-old rule of the state. “It is sad to see that election campaigns and freedom of information do not go together in Malaysia...