State Persecution

Palestinian journalists on Sunday announced a series of protests to demand that Hamas and Fatah stop targeting them. The announcement, made during several journalist demonstrations, came after a crackdown on newsmen in both the Fatah-controlled West Bank and the Hamas-run Gaza Strip. Embattled Palestinian reporters said such attacks had become the norm in the Palestinian territories. “Both Hamas...

Since fighting resumed in 2006 between the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the Tamil-populated Jaffna peninsula has become a nightmare for journalists, human rights activists and the civilian population in general. Murders, kidnappings, threats and censorship have made Jaffna one of the world’s most dangerous places for journalists to work in. Seven media...

Members of the Hamas Security Force beat up journalists covering a demonstration Friday held by the rival Fatah movement, briefly arresting four of them and confiscating their cameras in a sign of growing intolerance for political opposition, Arabnews.com has reported. The Hamas men fired guns over the heads of the protesters and scuffled with Fatah members, who threw stones and bottles at a...

Sudanese cameraman Sami al-Haj, a Guantanamo detainee since June 2002, has suffered a sharp deterioration in his health and is said to be fearing for his survival. Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) voiced “deep concern” about al-Haj, whose lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith said yesterday after recovering his notes from US military censors that his client’s health has worsened considerably in recent days...

Russian journalist Larisa Arap has been released from a psychiatric clinic near the northern city of Murmansk where she had been held against her will for 46 days. The 48-year Arap, an active member of the opposition United Civic Front, was forcefully hospitalised in what she says was retribution for an article she had written denouncing abuse against patients at another local psychiatric clinic...

The staff at a fledgling weekly newspaper in Yemen accused of damaging national security face death sentences if convicted. The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) Thursday warned that the recent charges brought against Al-Shar’a (The Street) and a raid on the newspaper’s office signalled a disturbing attack on independent media in the country. IFJ condemned the Yemeni government for...

A Tamil journalist was attacked with acid in the Sri Lankan capital Colombo just as he left hospital where he was undergoing treatment after an assault by soldiers in June, the Free Media Movement (FMM) has reported. A Sri Lankan policeman stands guard beside the bed of KP Mohan (right), an ethnic Tamil Journalist, in the National Hospital in Colombo August 16. An unidentified gang threw acid at...

Two Moroccan journalists who published a secret government document about terrorist threats against Morocco have been handed down prison sentences. Abderrahim Ariri, publisher of the Moroccan weekly Al-Watan Al An, and Mustafa Hormatallah, a journalist for the paper, were convicted Wednesday by a criminal court in Casablanca of “concealing items derived from a crime” under article 571 of the...

Bangladeshi investigative journalist Tasneem Khalil has fled the country with his family for security reasons, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. They had previously spent a month in hiding after he was arrested and tortured in May. Khalil, 26, is a journalist for the Dhaka-based Daily Star newspaper who conducts research for Human Rights Watch (HRW). According to his wife, four men in...

Palestinian cameraman Imad Ghanem who was badly injured in gunfire by Israeli soldiers in the Gaza Strip last month is still waiting to be allowed to leave Gaza and go to Egypt to be fitted with artificial legs. One month after asking Israeli defence minister Ehud Barak to investigate the circumstances in which Israeli soldiers fired on Ghanem on July 5 in the Gaza Strip, Reporters sans Frontières...