State Control

A court in Azerbaijan convicted a newspaper editor of state treason Tuesday and sentenced him to 10 years in prison, the Associated Press (AP) has eported. Novruzali Mammadov, the editor of Talysh Sado, or Voice of the Talysh, was arrested in February 2007 together with the paper's administrator, Elman Guliyev, who also was found guilty Tuesday and sentenced to six years imprisonment. The editor's...

A South Korean journalist was deported from Burma by the ruling military junta on June 22 for visiting the office of the opposition National League for Democracy (NLD). Lee Yu Kyong, a freelance journalist from South Korea, was deported to Thailand, according to Mizzima News. "At about 7:00 am, five policemen from Special Branch (a police unit in Rangoon) arrived at my hotel. They asked me where I...

A Rabat court ordered the Arabic-language daily Al Jarida Al Oula to stop publishing hitherto unpublished testimony about repression under the late King Hassan II, which senior officials gave to an official truth commission called the Equity and Reconciliation Panel (IER). The court issued on Thursday the order in response to a request by Ahmed Herzenni, an official appointed by King Mohammed to...

Swedish Parliament passed Wednesday evening a controversial bill allowing the government to monitor all SMS, email and other data traffic crossing Swedish borders with 143 in favour, 138 opposed and one parliamentarian abstaining. Faced with powerful criticism from the opposition, international experts, and from within its own ranks, the government sent the bill back to a parliamentary committee...

The adoption by the Belarus chamber of representatives of a media bill that would reinforce media registration procedures and, for the first time, extend media regulation to the Internet has free speech advocates a worried lot. The Belarus Association of Journalists (BAJ) had asked parliament’s human rights and media committee to examine whether articles 33 and 34 of the proposed new law violate...

A new broadcast law signed by Kyrgyzstan President Kurmanbek Bakiyev may threaten the future of a large number of news media outlets. The law, signed on June 4, gives the president the power to appoint the executive director of state-run TV and radio KTR. It also makes use of official languages partly compulsory as well as in-house production of programmes by the media. The president has however

Three years on, the Danish cartoon wars just won't rub out. Governments are stoking the crisis by instigating protests against the cartoonists or the newspapers that dared to report on the controversy, the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) and other IFEX members have found. Cartoonists and journalists from the Arab world, Europe and the US say that the Danish cartoon crisis is being

Fears of attacks on journalists are on the rise in China after a recent string of attacks on media that have ranged from unexplained detentions to violent physical assaults on reporters. Huang Qi, founder of website www.64tianwang.com, was Tuesday charged with illegally obtaining state secrets by the security bureau of Chengdu, Sichuan, after he and two colleagues were reportedly abducted by plain...

Three Media Monitoring Project of Zimbabwe (MMPZ) employees were released Wednesday last from detention without charges being laid, according to the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA). Abel Chikomo, Maureen Kademaunga and Abel Kaingidza were arrested and detained for three nights by Binga Police in Zimbabwe's Matabeleland North province before their release. The three, together with another...

Thailand's interior minister is under fire for moving to pull a private television channel off of cable networks nationwide, according to the Southeast Asian Press Alliance (SEAPA). Cable operators, opposition senators, and free expression advocates are calling a directive by Interior Minister Chalerm Yoobamrung - which media reports say threatens cable operators with imprisonment unless they pull...