State Persecution

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has called on Yemeni authorities to release Abdulelah Hider Shaea, a Yemeni journalist who covers Islamist groups including Al-Qaeda. Armed security forces arrested Shaea on Monday after raiding his family home, according to news reports. Shaea is a reporter for the official Saba News Agency and a frequent commentator and contributor to Al-Jazeera. He is...

The Iranian state committee that monitors the press has banned the well-known economic newspaper Asia, RFE/RL's Radio Farda reports. The Deputy Head of Iran's Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, Mohammad Ali Ramin, said the reasons for closing down "Asia" include "publishing pictures against public chastity,” “promoting wastefulness and extravagance," and "persistence in carrying out the...

Harassment of the Belarusian press has been on the upswing in the run-up to the presidential election that has been scheduled for next spring. What with the information ministry's repeated warnings, police raids, tax inspections and the country's new media law, press freedom is now severely compromised in Belarus. After receiving a series of information ministry warnings, two leading opposition...

Lisbon-based weekly Sol has been fined 1.5 million euros for defying a court injunction obtained by Rui Pedro Soares, the Portuguese government's former representative on the board of the national telecommunications company Portugal Telecom, not to publish details from phone conversations recorded in a police surveillance operation. Soares obtained the injunction on February 11 in response to a...

Carlos Flores Borja, the manager of Amazonian radio station La Voz de Bagua, travelled all the way to Lima last week because he had been given an appointment with transport and communications minister Enrique Cornejo on August 11 to discuss the reopening of the station, which the government closed 14 months ago. But in the end, Flores was received by deputy minister Jorge Cuba Hidalgo, who told...

Jake Hess, an American freelance journalist who writes for Inter Press Service (IPS), was arrested on August 11 in the mainly Kurdish city of Diyarbakir, in southeastern Turkey, and is currently being held at the headquarters of the city’s anti-terrorist unit. Accused of links with the Union of Kurdistan Communities (KSK), a new organisation that is alleged to be an offshoot of the outlawed...

The Lebanese army intelligence department detained journalist Hassan Alleik, a reporter for the Al-Akhbar newspaper, and questioned him for six hours on August 11 about an article published in the newspaper the previous day, according to press freedom group Maharat Foundatin. The article was about the escape of an agent named Ghassan El Jed, who was previously accused by Hezbollah secretary...

Security forces, police officers and members of the Asayesh intelligence service harassed a group of journalists on August 11 in Chamchamal, a town located between Sulaymaniyah and Kirkuk, in Iraqi Kurdistan, and even fired at one of them, according to Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). The journalists were covering a protest against a water shortage in the town. The...

A Zimbabwean minister who threatened to jail journalists who used information he said had been leaked from cabinet meetings, according to New York-based press freedom group Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Information Minister Webster Shamu made the threat on August 4. Shamu said that journalists and ministers could face jail sentences of up to 20 years under the 1970 Official Secrets Act...

The National Union of Somali Journalists (NUSOJ) has condemned the suspension from work of Nuh Muse Birjeb, a journalist working with the Voice of America (VOA) Somali Service, also the correspondent for Universal TV in the Puntland regions. "The suspension of a journalist who is merely carrying out his media work is a breach of press freedom. We understand that this is the height of a series of...