State Persecution

The US military says it will recommend criminal charges against an Associated Press photographer detained in 2006 on suspicion of helping Iraqi insurgents. The Pentagon says additional evidence has come to light proving Bilal Hussein is a “terrorist media operative” who infiltrated the news agency. The case will be passed to Iraqi judges who will decide if he should be tried. AP says its own...

Attacks on freedom of expression riding on notorious laws are increasing in Bahrain. Recent incidents have prompted 26 International Freedom of Expression eXchange (IFEX) members and 21 other organisations, led by the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights (BCHR), to urge the authorities to stop their latest clampdown on free expression. The organisations in their call to Bahraini government have...

All four journalists arrested recently have been released by the Senegal government in a bid to “defuse relations" between the press and the government, but the storm has far from blown over. All four were released Thursday. Besides the four arrested journalists, who were all held in detention, a fifth has been facing defamation charges after he published a book that accused employees of

Reporters Without Borders today urged the authorities to stop the prosecution of Abdulkarim Al-Khaiwani, a freelance journalist and former editor of the now closed weekly Al-Shoura, on a charge of “publishing information liable to undermine army morale” under article 126 of the criminal code, for which the maximum penalty is death. “Khaiwani is critical of the government headed by President Ali...

Yahoo shares plunged again Wednesday, a day after Congress hammered top executives over the company’s cooperation with Chinese officials in the jailing of a pro-democracy journalist. Shares slumped 7.7% as Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., renewed a call for Yahoo to endorse his bill banning such cooperation. Smith said he remained “absolutely bewildered and angered” that the beleaguered Internet portal...

Reporters Without Borders is disappointed by yesterday’s testimony by Yahoo! chief executive officer Jerry Yang and the company’s vice president and senior general counsel, Michael Callahan, to a US House of Representatives foreign affairs committee hearing on Callahan’s earlier controversial statements to Congress about the company’s involvement in the arrest of Chinese journalist Shi Tao in 2005...

Two top Yahoo Inc. officials on Tuesday defended their company’s role in the jailing of a Chinese journalist but ran into withering criticism from lawmakers who accused them of complicity with an oppressive communist regime. Yahoo gave the Chinese government information about Shi Tao’s online activities, and he was jailed for 10 years. “While technologically and financially you are giants, morally...

Reporters Without Borders voiced outrage today at the suspended sentence of two months in prison passed by Casablanca court yesterday on AIC Press agency director Mourad Bourja for “disrespect for agent of the state in the exercise of his duties.” “Judicial harassment of the Moroccan press since the start of the year has dispelled any illusions about the government’s talk of a political opening,”...

The latest jail terms handed down to journalists in Egypt are making the country being seen as one of the most repressive for media in the world. A court has imposed a sentence of one-month’s forced labour on editor of Al-Wafd, Anwar Al-Hawari and Younes Darwish, the daily’s correspondent in Assyout, 380 km south of Cairo, for “publishing false news” about fraud by two members of the

Two French photojournalists have been formally charged in the eastern Chadian city of Abéché with “kidnapping minors” and “fraud” along with members of Arche de Zoé (Zoé’s Ark), the French charity whose activities they were covering. The two journalists are Marc Garmirian of the Capa news agency and Jean-Daniel Guillou of the Synchro X agency. Another French journalist, Marie-Agnès