State Persecution

Journalist AS Mani has been release on bail on an order that his lawyer managed to obtain from a Tamil Nadu appeal court on Thursday last. The publisher and editor of the Chennai-based magazine Naveena Netrikkan, Mani will however have to remain for the next month in Chidambaram, which is 250 km from Chennai. Arrested on the orders of Police Commissioner SR Jangid on July 19 after publishing an...

Africa’s leading press freedom advocates met in Kenya this week to support the Declaration of Table Mountain, a freedom of expression campaign organised by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) to repeal criminal defamation and insult laws across the continent. The inaugural meeting of the campaign’s steering committee, held in Nairobi on September 1 and 2 , brought...

China’s colossal Sanmenxia dam has a new victim – Xie Chaoping, a journalist who was arrested without a warrant in the northeastern city of Weinan on August 19 after writing a book about the fate of those displaced by the dam. He is now reportedly being held by the Public Security Department in Beijing. Much has been written about this dam, a major source of environmental damage and human...

Russian police, some armed and masked, raided a prominent opposition magazine on Thursday as part of an unspecified investigation. The three-hour raid on the New Times, an independent Moscow-based weekly, was carried out by armed and masked police officers led by Col Stanislav Pashkovsky, the head of the General Directorate of Internal Affairs (GUVD) for the Moscow region, who wanted to identify...

More than two weeks have gone by without any news of reporter Abdul Ilah Haydar Shae and cartoonist Kamal Sharaf since their arrests in Sanaa on August 16 and 17, which have been followed by an increase in cases of violence against journalists. An Al-Qaeda specialist who works for the Saba new agency, Shae was arrested at his home at the end of the daily Ramadan fast on the evening of August 16...

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has demanded the immediate release of two Yemeni journalists who have been held without charge since August 16 and accused the Yemeni government of broken promises for backtracking on pledges to allow journalists in the country to work freely. Abdelelaah Shaie, a reporter working for the official Yemeni News Agency (SABA), and Kmal Sharaf, a...

Kurdish publications have again been suspended or seized under the Anti-Terrorism Law (Law 3713), which allows the Turkish courts to impose harsh penalties on journalists and media when they allude to Kurdish armed separatists and fosters a repressive climate for the Kurdish media. Although the European Court of Human Rights has repeatedly condemned Turkey because of the Anti-Terrorism Law, the...

Malawi’s President Bingu wa Mutharika last week threatened to shut down newspapers that “tarnish” his government’s image. The president, who was speaking at an agriculture show in the capital city of Liongwe, seemed to be referring to a story in the privately-owned Malawi News Daily, reports said. The story quoted a report from the Southern African Development Community (SADC), an economic...

The International Press Institute (IPI) has expressed grave concern for the state of media freedom in Ukraine after a court ruling forced one TV station off the air and limited the licences of another. At a hearing in Kiev on Monday, August 30, the two privately-run TV channels, TVi and 5 Kanal, were told their broadcast frequencies would be cancelled after the court found in favour of allegations...

It was the phrase "with opprobrious underworld connotations" that Viktor Biryukov, chief press spokesman for the Moscow police, used to explain the reasons for a business reputation protection claim lodged against the newspaper Noviye Izvestia (NI). The claim filing followed a January 2010 series of NI articles citing complaints by residents of the (now partially destroyed) village of Rechnik, on...