State Impunity

Gunmen on a motorcycle Thursday shot and killed the editor of a Sri Lankan newspaper critical of the government, the second violent attack on media this week. Sunday Leader Chief Editor Lasantha Wickramatunga was in a car on his way to work when he was attacked, Wickramatunga's brother Lal told Reuters. "The gunman smashed the window of the vehicle and shot at him," Lal Wickramatunga said. Doctors...

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has welcomed the ten-point agreement between the Nepal government and the Federation of Nepali Journalists (FNJ), which led to the cancellation of a nationwide demonstration over growing attacks on the media. In signing the agreement on January 5, Information and Communications Minister Krishna Bahadur Mahara reportedly said that the government...

More than 10 journalists were injured on Monday when the police tried to break up a rally taken out in capital Kathmandu by the Federation of Nepalese Journalists (FNJ) to protest Sunday's attack on Himalmedia by supporters of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), the principal constituent of the ruling coalition in Nepal. According to ekantipur.com, the police personnel at Maitighar Mandala, a...

The Mexican special federal prosecutor for dealing with attacks on the media, Octavio Alberto Orellana Wiarco, has ruled out that two young women community journalists in Oaxaca State were killed because of their work. His public statement that the radio journalists of the Triqui indigenous community were shot in an attack aimed at the driver of their vehicle showed yet again the special...

Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has appealed to the United Nations to help bring Gebran Tueni’s murderers to justice. A parliamentarian and publisher of one of the Middle East’s leading Arabic-language dailies, Tueni was killed in a targeted car-bombing in the Beirut suburb of Mkalles three years ago, December 12, 2005. “We join the Tueni family and all of An-Nahar’s staff in voicing our deep...

Journalists in the Gambia still live in fear of authorities who have allowed continuing impunity to the killers of Deyda Hydara, co-founder of the Point, four years after his murder on December 16, 2004. Hydara, who was also correspondent for Agence France-Presse (AFP) and Reporters sans Frontières (RSF), was shot dead by unidentified gunmen from a taxi as he was driving his car in an outlying...

The police in Burkina Faso on Monday summoned four leaders of the Collective against Impunity, two days after they organised a march calling for a renewed investigation into the unsolved 1998 murder of investigative journalist Norbert Zongo. Among those questioned was Jean-Claude Meda, the president of the Association of Journalists of Burkina Faso, who told the New York-based Committee to Protect...

A veteran crime reporter José Armando Rodríguez’s murder has been instrumental in the launch of a nationwide campaign to protect journalists in Mexico. In November 2008, Rodríguez was shot dead at his home in Ciudad Juárez on the Texas border. With the government doing little to protect journalists, ARTICLE 19 and National Centre for Social Communication (CENCOS) have launched their own campaign

If state impunity itself over the scores of unsolved murder cases of journalists in Russia was not enough, press freedom groups now have to even prove that the killings were indeed murders. The death of Magomed Yevloyev, who succumbed to injuries in hospital after being shot on the temple while in police custody on August 31, had evoked criticism against the government and the police from

Justice still eludes Radio Echo 2000 journalist, Brignol Lindor, who was murdered in the southwestern town of Petit-Goâve, Haiti in 2001. Two men implicated in the murder were given life sentences in December 2007. Seven others, convicted in absentia of Linder’s murder on January 23 this year, are still on the run. Paris-based Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) hopes the appointment of Lindor’s