State Persecution

An imprisoned Australian newspaper publisher who appeared in court in Burma was told he would remain in jail until at least March 3, when he was scheduled to appear in court again, according to new.com.au. Ross Dunkley, editor of the Rangoon-based English-language weekly The Myanmar Times, was arrested on February 10 for allegedly violating Burmese immigration codes. The case attracted significant...

Attempts of governments in the Middle East to censor news coverage of protests remains unabated. In Yemen, men stormed the Journalists' Syndicate on Saturday, and in Iraq, journalists demanded apologies from the military after a crackdown on the press on Friday, and Baghdad Operations Command offered the apologies on Sunday, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ)...

The police in Bulgaria recently confiscated copies of news bulletin Macedonia Voice, according to delayed reports received by the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression (CJFE) . According to reports in the local press, and a statement issued by United Macedonian Diaspora (UMD) based in Washington, D.C., officers of the State Agency for National Security (DANS) entered the Iranik-M printing house...

Mir Hossein Mousavi, owner of the suspended newspaper Kalameh Sabaz, his wife, author Zahra Rahnavard, and Mehdi Karoubi, owner of the suspended Etemad Melli, and his wife have been arrested in Iran, according to Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). Gholam-Hossein Mohseni Ejei, the Tehran public prosecutor, told a press conference on February 27 that the two newspaper...

The government today said a Chinese woman, reportedly deported last month, was a journalist and there was no evidence about her being a spy as some media reports had suggested, according to a Press Trust of India (PTI) report. "There was indeed a case of a Chinese lady who had met some of these (Naga) leaders. But on investigation, we were not able to establish that she was a spy," home minister P...

Spanish journalist Paco Gomez Nadal was arrested in Panama City in one of the protests staged around the country, mainly by Indian groups, against the reform of the mining law, the government said, according to the Latin American Herald Tribune. “The National Police arrested foreigner Francisco Gomez Nadal at a time when he was instigating and organizing a group of citizens who were preparing to...

Owners of independent Tajik newspapers are complaining that a new ban on selling newspapers on the streets of Dushanbe is hurting sales, RFE/RL's Tajik Service reports. Zafar Sufi, the owner and chief editor of the weekly newspaper Ozodagon, told RFE/RL on February 23 that most people buy newspapers on their way to work or when they walk in the city center, and the ban curbs those purchases. The...

Cameroon's government is obstructing journalists from reporting on issues of public interest. Security forces detained a journalist without charge for six days after he interviewed a jailed former official. They also seized footage from reporters covering the brutal repression of a banned opposition march on Wednesday, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has reported. Late on Wednesday...

The Committee to protect Journalists documented additional attacks Friday in Iraq, Yemen, and Libya as journalists tried to cover anti-government protests. Iraqi authorities cracked down on media: Security forces stormed a satellite TV office, detained dozens of journalists, and confiscated equipment, according to local journalists and news reports. In Yemen, at least four journalists were...

Iván Hernández Carrillo, a Cuban journalist imprisoned since March 2003, was released on parole Saturday and permitted to remain in the country, bringing to 19 the number of reporters and editors freed after an agreement between the President Raúl Castro and the Catholic Church. The Committee to Protect Journalists called on Cuban authorities today to lift all conditions on Hernández Carrillo's...