Source Protection

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has deplored the decision by the police in the Republic of the Maldives to summon two journalists for interrogation after their newspaper carried news of a pornographic video racket operating in parts of the country. Ahmed Hamdhoon and Ismail Naseer, who researched and wrote the story in the Dhivehi-language edition of the daily Haveeru, were...

Hungary's parliament last week passed another element of a controversial media reform package which will force journalists to identify their sources in stories involving national security and public safety. The law comes into effect on January 1, 2011. If faced with judicial action, journalists would only be able to keep their source secret if such secrecy is ruled to be in the public interest...

Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) says it has received several calls from journalists complaining of the difficulties they have had in covering the ongoing street protests against the government’s pension reform plans. A Canal+ reporter was hit repeatedly by members of the CRS riot police in Paris on October 17. On the grounds of an alleged “invasion of the privacy”...

The issue of editorial confidentiality has been dominating media discussions in recent days in Austria, after the Vienna Higher Regional Court (OLG) ordered Austrian Public Broadcasting Corporation (ORF) to release the unedited tapes of an episode of a documentary series called “Am Schauplatz” (“On the scene”) that was filmed in March this year. The documentary became the subject of controversy...

Russian police, some armed and masked, raided a prominent opposition magazine on Thursday as part of an unspecified investigation. The three-hour raid on the New Times, an independent Moscow-based weekly, was carried out by armed and masked police officers led by Col Stanislav Pashkovsky, the head of the General Directorate of Internal Affairs (GUVD) for the Moscow region, who wanted to identify...

The European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) has welcomed a landmark decision by the Constitutional Court of Serbia rejecting repressive amendments to the Public Information Act of Serbia. The Journalists' Association of Serbia (JAS), an EFJ affiliate, has won its appeal against the Act after its adoption by the Serbian Parliament in August 2009. In the ruling of July 22, the court found in favour...

An Abidjan criminal court has acquitted the editor, managing editor and publisher of the Nouveau Courrier d’Abidjan newspaper, who had been originally been charged with theft of an official document, publishing information about a judicial case that has not yet been tried and revealing a confidential document. The three journalists, editor Saint Claver Oula, publisher Stéphane Guédé and managing...

Serbian national security and police forces have been given the power to view the contents of citizens' personal email accounts without permission as a result of a new law adopted by parliament on June 19, the International Press Institute (IPI) has reported. The legal system has also left journalists vulnerable to attacks with a recent court decision to reject charges against six people who...

Three journalists have been detained in Ivory Coast since Tuesday, after they refused to disclose sources for an investigative report detailing the results of a government probe into corruption in the coffee and cocoa export trade, according to local journalists and news reports. Ivorian State Prosecutor Raymond Tchimou, who summoned staffers from the private daily Le Nouveau Courrier—Managing...

A Canadian supreme court decision ordering the Toronto-based National Post newspaper to surrender documents pointing to a conflict of interest in a loan that a state-owned bank gave to a friend of former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien is being seen as a deterrent for confidentiality of sources. The ruling, issued on May 7, jeopardises the protection of sources, a fundamental principle without which...