State Persecution

Cameroonian journalist Charles Atangana has been granted bail in the UK for six weeks. Atangana, who is seeking asylum in the UK, will now be able to prepare his application for permission to seek a judicial review with closer support from his friends and trade union colleagues. UK's National Union of Journalists (NUJ) is trying to stop Glasgow-based Atangana from being deported to Cameroon where...

Burundian authorities freed the director of a weekly publication arrested this week on defamation charges, the journalist said Friday. Thierry Ndayishimiye, the director of the Arc-en-ciel weekly, was released on Thursday, two days after he was detained over an article in which he accused the director of the national water and electricity firm of trying to cover up embezzlement of $110,000....

Trumped-up charges of extremism have been pressed in Kyrgyzstan against Ulugbek Abdusalomov, the editor of an independent newspaper, and Azimjon Askarov, a journalist and human rights defender, according to press freedom group Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Prosecutors in the southern city of Jalal-Abad charged Abdusalomov, editor of the Uzbek-language newspaper Diydor, and Askarov, head...

The Russian interior ministry has carried out raids on news media and journalists as part of its investigation into an attack on an administrative building in Khimki, a satellite town on Moscow’s northern outskirts, by hundreds of protesters on the night of July 28, Paris-based Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. Representatives of the interior ministry’s Moscow region investigating...

The property of the television and radio company Chornomorska, which is the main mass media outlet of the Crimean opposition, has been seized, according to the "Ukrayinska Pravda" online edition. The building that houses the editorial office and videotape recording studio, as well as the office of the ASsol radio station, cars and all other belongings regardless of their location are to be seized...

The Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), headed by the president of the Kurdistan Regional Government, Massoud Barzani, has been waging a hate campaign for the past week against Lvin magazine, accusing it of besmirching the memory of Barzani’s father, the late Kurdish nationalist leader Mullah Mostafa Barzani. The offending article in Lvin magazine, published on August 1, consisted of an interview...

Venezuelan newscaster Alexander Mireles has said that his radio programme "Hablando Claro y Raspao", broadcast by radio station Class 98.7 FM, was taken off the air on July 6 because Teodoro Bolívar, governor of the State of Cojedes in central Venezuela, bought all of the station's air time, according to delayed reports. Mireles, who is critical of Bolívar's administration, told Instituto Prensa y...

The Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) has sued magazine Rojname for $1 billion. A report published in the magazine on July 20 had accused the KDP and its ruling coalition partner, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), of helping smuggle refined petroleum products into Iran in violation of the international sanctions imposed on the Islamic Republic by the UN Security Council. The article accused the...

Burundian police on Tuesday arrested Thierry Ndayishimiye, chief editor of the private weekly Arc-en-Ciel, on defamation charges related to a story about alleged government corruption, according to New York-based press freedom group Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Ndayishimiye is the second Burundian editor to be jailed in less than a month. The state prosecutor summoned Ndayishimiye to a...

Sudan halted Monday BBC broadcasts in Arabic on FM radio frequencies after suspending its agreement with the British public broadcaster for reasons it said had nothing to do with its newscasts, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported. In a statement carried by the official Suna news agency late on Sunday, the information ministry alleged that the BBC had imported technical equipment via British...