Ethics and Freedom

A Vietnamese journalist has been awarded a jail sentence on charges that she spread anti-state propaganda, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has reported. Pham Thanh Nghien, a freelance writer, was arrested during a government crackdown on dissidents in September 2008 and originally charged with staging a protest against Vietnamese policy on a maritime dispute with China, according to...

A Moscow court has ruled against freelance journalist and former Soviet dissident Alexandre Podrabinek in a lawsuit by Second World War veteran Viktor Semenov, who claimed he was offended by an online article last September criticising government attempts to paint a rosy picture of the Soviet era. In its ruling, issued on January 27, the court ordered Podrabinek to pay Semenov 1,000 roubles (23...

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has called on the Uzbek authorities to immediately drop all charges against Umida Akhmedova, a prominent photojournalist and documentary filmmaker who covers gender, ethnic, and cultural issues, and allow her to continue to do her work without fear of reprisal. On January 13, investigators with the city police department in the Uzbek capital, Tashkent...

Flouting a January 15 supreme court ruling, state-owned TV stations Rupavahini and ITN continue to openly favour President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s campaign to win another term in the presidential election to be held on January 26 with a total of 21 candidates taking part. Detailed monitoring by Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has established that 98.5 per cent of the news and current affairs air-time...

Reporters Without Borders today condemned as an act of political revenge the cancellation of a television station’s licence, seven months after the same action was taken against radio La Voz de Bagua Grande, also in the Amazonas region. Televisión Oriente, based in Yurimaguas in the north-east Peru, lost its broadcast licence on January 15 on the order of the Transport and Communications Ministry...

US journalist, Jared Malsin, editor for the English service of the Palestinian press agency Ma’an, was expelled from Israel under suspicious circumstances, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has said. “The journalist was expelled after giving up his right of appeal. This decision was taken in dubious circumstances in that the journalist’s lawyer was not present,” Paris-based RSF said. "Did the...

Yemeni journalist Moaz Ashhabi was sentenced on January 16 to one year in prison by a court in Sana’a dealing with press matters which also banned him from working as journalist for one year for “falsification" of the Koran, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. The charge related to his column that was carried by the weekly al-Thaqafa (Culture) on October 7, 2009. Ashhabi was taken to the...

A three-month jail sentence has been slapped by a Sana’a special court for press matters on Anissa Mohammed Ali Othman for “insulting the president” in two articles for the weekly Al-Wassat in July 2007. The court on Saturday also banned her from working as a journalist for a year and fined her editor, Jamal Amer 10,000 rials (34 euros), Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. Published in...

US journalist Jared Malsin is still being held in a detention centre at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion international airport, according to Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). He was arrested on arrival at the airport on January 12 and questioned for eight hours about his work as a journalist for Ma’an, an independent Palestinian news agency based in Bethlehem. He was due to be taken before a judge on Sunday...

Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has expressed concern about a ruling by Jordan’s highest appeal court, published on January 13, that news websites and electronic media are subject to the country’s press and publications law. Media and communications minister Nabil Al-Sharif told the Jordan Times that the court’s decision was reached independently and should therefore be applied. The ruling poses a...