State Persecution

The Committee to Protect Journalists has expressed outrage at the the police beating of Emin Huseynov, head of the Institute for Reporters’ Freedom and Safety (IRFS), in Baku, Azerbaijan, on June 14. Huseynov was covering an event for the 80th birthday of slain Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara. Policed raided the event and took Huseynov to a police station where he was isolated, interrogated...

Mohamed Nema Oumar, the Mauritanian publisher of the privately-owned, Arabic-language weekly Al-Houriya, was released on Friday evening after being held for 30 hours in a police station in the Nouakchott district of Tevragh Zeina, according to the Paris-based Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). He was charged two days later with "libel and insult" and was ordered to report to the police twice a week...

The Azerbaijan police Saturday raided an event organised by the "Che Guevera Fan Club" to mark the 80th birthday of Che Guevera, according to the Institute for Reporter Freedom and Safety (IRFS). Of the 25 people present, 20 were detained by police and taken to Nasimi District Police Department #22. Among those detained were IRFS Chairman Emin Huseynov and IRFS researchers Rasim Aliyev and...

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has joined the five leading journalists’ organisations in Sri Lanka to demand that senior Tamil journalist JS Tissainayagam, who spent his 100th day in detention on June 15, be released as no evidence has been provided to sustain a charge against him. Tissainayagam, the editor of the newly formed OutreachSL.com news website, was arrested by the...

Three Media Monitoring Project of Zimbabwe (MMPZ) employees were released on June 11 from detention without charges being laid. 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 Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA) has reported. The three, together with another 10...

The Chinese police arrested Internet writer Zeng Hongling in Chengdu, the capital of the earthquake-hit province of Sichuan, on Monday for publishing personal accounts of the earthquake on overseas Chinese-language websites, according to news reports and a Chinese press freedom advocate. Three days later, a well-known Internet publisher and human rights advocate, Huang Qi, went missing in Chengdu...

Zimbabwe is going through serious political violence perpetrated by the party in power, ZANU PF. This violence is also taking place in a context of major economic challenges that the country faces where inflation is estimated to be greater than 1 million percent. There have also been food shortages, which are further exacerbated through the banning of humanitarian food distribution by NGOs by the

The Iranian government is continuing its persecution of cyber-feminists — women who use online publications to defend their rights. Nine were arrested yesterday for organising a meeting in Tehran to commemorate a big demonstration they staged two years ago. They were all released this morning. “The authorities have tried yet again to intimidate women who are just demanding their rights,” Paris...

Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) voiced alarm Friday about a programme broadcast by state television stations Namangan TV and Ferghana TV on June 10 that attacked Radio Free Europe (RFE), a US-funded international radio station based in Prague, and gave the addresses of its Uzbek correspondents and the schools attended by their children. “We are extremely disturbed by this smear campaign against...

Angered by film footage and photographs depicting the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis which have appeared in media outside of Burma, the junta is now undertaking to seize all still photography and video cameras being used by small-scale professionals, and even those that are privately owned by households, Mizzima News has reported. In particular, authorities have targeted smallscale, private...