State Persecution

Military prosecutors in Switzerland have opened an investigation into a newspaper editor and two journalists for having published news of a secret fax which appears to confirm allegations of CIA secret prisons in Europe, Italian news agency Adnkronos International (AKI) has reported. GOING TO THE POLE: The airport in Szymany, Poland, identified by Human Rights Watch as a potential site of alleged...

A Chinese researcher for the New York Times was indicted Friday for revealing state secrets to the newspaper and on a lesser charge of fraud, a move that should send the case to trial within six weeks, his lawyer said. The indictment signified a decision by prosecutors to proceed with a trial of 43-year-old Zhao Yan, after 15 months of investigation by the State Security Ministry during which Zhao...

China is sending a Chinese journalist working for the New York Times to trial charged with exposing state secrets, his lawyer said on Friday. Zhao Yan, who worked as a researcher for the paper before his arrest in September last year, won the Reporters Without Borders 2005 prize this month for journalists who have “shown a strong commitment to press freedom”. “The way they have done this shows...

A Beijing-based correspondent for the respected German weekly newspaper Die Zeit was detained for five hours Friday near so-called cancer villages along a severely polluted river in central China. Georg Blume said in a telephone interview from the hotel room where he was being held in Shenqiu, Henan province, and was accused of conducting 'illegal interviews'. He was cross-examined until he was...

The International Press Institute (IPI) has condemned the ongoing treatment of the magazine Cicero and its reporter Bruno Schirra by German authorities, and urged the German interior minister to suspend the prosecutions against the magazine and its reporter. In a letter to the German interior minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, the IPI urged the ministry and the prosecutor's office to issue new...

London, 24 Nov. (AKI) - The widow of Tariq Ayyoub, the journalist from satellite TV network Al Jazeera, who was killed when the station’s Baghdad offices were bombed in 2003, says she is considering sueing the US government over his death. The revelation follows reports in British newspaper The Daily Mirror, that US president George W. Bush planned to bomb Al Jazeera’s headquarters in Qatar but...

The head of the Chinese Internet company that has acquired Yahoo's China operations has defended the US portal's decision to help communist authorities track down and prosecute dissident journalist Shi Tao, the Financial Times has reported. Yahoo has been widely condemned for assisting the case against Shi Tao, who was jailed for 10 years in April this year for revealing information about...

Yahoo's chairman and chief executive officer Terry Semel strongly defended the company's decision to turn over evidence to Chinese authorities that helped the government convict a local journalist and send him to jail for 10 years. Companies that do business internationally have to respect and abide by the laws of the countries in which they operate, whether that be China or any other country, he...

On the afternoon of April 20, 2004 Shi Tao, head of the Editorial Department of Contemporary Business News, located in Hunan Province, PRC, took notes at a department meeting. Those notes contained references to information in a CPC official document entitled: "A Notice Regarding Current Stabilizing Work" -- a euphemism for the central government's efforts to keep dissent to a minimum on the eve...

China's repressive government may one day allow the full flood of the Internet to sweep through Chinese society, but for now it is still dedicated to building ever higher and stronger seawalls against liberating knowledge. Over the weekend, two state censorship agencies issued new and more stringent rules about what news can be published on the Internet and who can publish it. The rules...