State Persecution

Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has called on Iranian authorities to release journalist Mahboubeh Karami of the government news agency ISNA at once. She has not seen a lawyer since her arrest in Tehran on June 13 after criticising the police for beating up demonstrators. The organisation is also concerned about the suspension of two weekly newspapers in the west of the country. "Mahboubeh Karami's...

Tunisian journalist Slim Boukhdir has been released from prison four months before the end of his sentence. The freelance journalist, set free on July 21, was held since November 26, 2007 in very harsh prison conditions at the civil jail in Sfax, 230 km south of the capital. Boukhdir, 39, is correspondent for the pan-Arab London-based newspaper al Quds al Arabi and for the website of satellite...

Fuhara Mugisha, the deputy managing editor of Rwanda's leading independent weekly, Umuseso has been deported from the country. Despite having a Rwandan mother, Mugisha is a citizen of neighbouring Tanzania. "This is an unacceptable act of intimidation that yet again highlights the Rwandan government's inability to tolerate the few independent publications," Paris-based Reporters sans Frontières...

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has voiced its protest against the detention without charge of an Associated Press (AP) journalist who was seized by US and Iraqi forces last month in the Iraqi city of Tikrit. Ahmed Nouri Raziak, a 38-year-old cameraman who has worked with AP Television News since 2003, was detained at his home in the Iraqi city of Tikrit on June 4, AP reported, and is...

Mexican President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa's government has ordered Forum magazine be denied government advertising contracts in retaliation for its critical stance, the magazine's director, Eduardo Ibarra Aguirre, has alleged. In a July 2008 editorial, Ibarra Aguirre said that members of the presidential press team have instructed all government agencies to not place announcements in Forum/...

Three South African nationals employed by Sky News - Bernet Hasani Sono, Resemate Chauke and Simon Musimani - who were serving a six-month jail term in Zimbabwe have since been released after a High Court judge reviewed the sentence and commuted it to a fine. The three were convicted on their own plea to contravening Section 33 (1) of the Postal and Telecommunications Chapter 12:03 by illegally...

Reuters has urged the US military to hand over video footage from US attack helicopters and other materials relating to the killing of two Iraqi staff in Baghdad a year ago. Photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen, 22, and driver Saeed Chmagh, 40, were killed in a US helicopter air strike in eastern Baghdad on July 12, 2007. Noor-Eldeen and Chmagh had gone to the area after hearing of a military raid on a...

A contributing reporter for the Turkmen Service of the U.S.-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) who was forcibly held for two weeks in two different psychiatric facilities has now had his phone disabled, according to RFE/RL. Bowing to international pressure, authorities freed Sazak Durdymuradov on July 3. A security officer warned him to "go and tell the truth" about his treatment in...

A Rabat court Friday fined Al-Jazeera's Rabat bureau chief, Hassan Rachidi, 50,000 dirhams (approx. 4,500 euros) under article 42 of the press law because the Qatar-based satellite TV station wrongly reported in June that people were killed in clashes between police and protesters in the southern port city of Sidi Ifni. "We welcome the fact that the judges had the good sense not to impose a jail...

Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has called for the reopening of Afaq TV, a Palestinian commercial TV station based in the West Bank city of Nablus which Israeli soldiers closed on July 10 for one year on the grounds that it was a "terrorist" media outlet. The station has stopped broadcasting and seals have been place over its entrance. "Palestinian journalists must be allowed to enjoy the same...