State Persecution

To mark World Press Freedom Day, Moroccan journalist Mustafa Hormatallah began a three-day hunger strike on Friday to protest his imprisonment in Casablanca, while journalists led by the National Syndicate of the Moroccan Press planned to stage a sit-in on Saturday. Hormatallah, a journalist with the independent weekly Al-Watan Al An, was sentenced in August 2007 to eight months in jail, and his...

Fiji's military government deported the Australian publisher of Rupert Murdoch's Fiji Times newspaper on Friday, after declaring him a threat to national security, according to Reuters. The move is the latest crackdown on the media in Fiji since military commander Frank Bainimarama seized power in a bloodless coup in late 2006, and comes amid growing international criticism of the slow progress in...

Pakistan's information ministry has forwarded letters from two Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) supporters to an English newspaper and asked it to print them to rebut an article criticising party leader Asif Ali Zardari, the Indo-Asian News Service (IANS) has reported. “In what is really unheard of, the press officer of the information ministry forwarded two letters of unknown PPP supporters to The...

Press freedom panel Committee to Protect Journalists on Tuesday condemned the weekend arrest of three Ugandan journalists for publishing inflammatory reports. Police on Saturday detained Andrew Mwenda, publisher of the bi-monthly magazine Independent, consulting editor Odobo Bichachi and journalist John Njoroge and accused them of "possessing seditious materials" and "publishing inflammatory...

The Malaysian government Thursday lifted the ban on publication of a prominent Tamil daily in the face of fierce criticism by Opposition leaders and pressure from media activists, the Press Trust of India (PTI) has reported. The country's Home Ministry had suspended the publication permit of "Makkal Osai" or People's voice last week on the grounds that the paper had flouted publication guidelines...

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has expressed concern at the harassment in Chechnya of Jane Armstrong, Moscow correspondent for the Canadian national daily the Globe and Mail. Armstrong and her Russian photographer and interpreter Olga Kravets had travelled from Moscow to the Chechen capital of Grozny to report on social and cultural traditions in the southern republic last week, when...

A prosecutor dropped two-year-old charges against freelance journalist Sydney Saize in restive Zimbabwe on Tuesday, while a magistrate denied bail to freelancer Frank Chikowore, who has been detained for more than a week. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) Wednesday called for Chikowore’s immediate release. Mutare prosecutor Malvern Musarurwa declined to pursue charges against Saize, who...

A Somali radio journalist was detained for eight hours by police on Monday, amid the deadliest violence Mogadishu has experienced in months, the reporter told Agence France-Presse (AFP). "I got my freedom back," Abdi Mohamed Ismail, Shabelle Radio news editor, told AFP after his release. "They dealt with me fairly, but they didn't ask me anything during the whole time that I spent in custody...

Radio Netherlands Worldwide journalist Abir Sarras was arrested at Tel Aviv airport on Sunday night. She was told that she would not be permitted to enter Israel and that she would be put on a plane back to the Netherlands, the radio station reported. Palestinian-born Sarras, who holds a Dutch passport, had been planning to produce a series of reports about Israel's 60 year existence. Sarras used...

Police in Somalia have released five journalists and allowed their radio station to resume broadcasting, Agence France-Presse (AFP0 has repored quoting its staff. The Radio Voice Peace journalists were released overnight hours after they were detained for the station's coverage of an attack on Wednesday night by Islamist insurgents in Mogadishu's KM4 neighbourhood. The station reported that the...