State Persecution

The Federation of African Journalists (FAJ) has expressed concern at the growing tendency towards enactment and enforcement of more repressive, complicated legal sanctions against journalists. In Senegal, Cameroon, Tunisia and Burundi, journalists and their leaders face constant harassment and threats to their safety as part of a brazen campaign to curb the right to freedom of expression in Africa...

Amer Abu Arfa, a correspondent for the Shihab news agency, has been convicted and imprisoned in connection with his news coverage. The agency, based in the Gaza Strip, is perceived by the Palestinian Authority as being pro-Hamas. Abu Arfa was arrested on May 11 by Palestinian security forces, according to his father, who told Shihab that his son was taken from their home by the Palestinian...

Kuwaiti Prime Minister Nasser AlAhmad AlSabah has filed a complaint against Ibrahim Eissa, editor of Egyptian daily Al-Dustour and Kuwaiti journalist Mohammed Alweshaihi accusing them of insult and libel. Lately, Al-Dustour had reported on the trials of Kuwaiti journalist Mohamed AlJassim, and slammed the Kuwaiti PM for being behind them, the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI) has...

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has accused the authorities in Tunisia of engaging in a "relentless campaign" of intimidation and harassment of a journalists' leader. IFJ says Zied-el-Heni, a member of the leadership of the Syndicat national des journalistes tunisiens (SNJT) and of the steering committee of the African Federation of Journalistes (FAJ), the IFJ regional group, is...

Journalists employed by two radio stations in Yopal, the capital of the northeastern department of Casanare, stopped work today Thursday and demonstrated silently, with their mouths gagged, in the city's main square to protest against a lawsuit targeting eight of their colleagues and to demand respect for freedom of information. Eight journalists who work for Violeta Stéreo or La Voz de Yopal are...

Authorities arrested a journalist on Tuesday on criminal defamation charges in Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Hours earlier, in an unrelated incident, armed men briefly forced the city’s three main opposition broadcasters off the air, according to local journalists and news reports. Pascal Mulunda, editor of weekly Le Monitor, has been held in Kinshasa's Penitentiary and...

Russian editor Pyotr Lipatov has been exonerated of charges that he fomented extremism by publishing articles that created “negative stereotypes and negative images of members of the security forces,” among other faults. A court on Tuesday threw out the case against Lipatov saying that the the expert testimony that prosecutors had relied upon to prove that the articles were extremist was...

Tunisian journalist Fahem Boukadous has been in extremely poor health since police arrested him on July 15 to begin serving a four-year jail sentence for covering protests in the Gafsa mining region in the spring of 2008 for the international satellite TV station El Hiwar Ettounsi. Boukadous, who suffers from acute asthma attacks and was undergoing medical tests when police arrested him, is being...

Tunisian authorities have in the past few days stepped up their harassment of journalists who dare to criticise the government and defend freedom of expression. Poet and journalist Taoufik Ben Brik has been under house arrest for the past few days, after writing two articles for the French newspaper Nouvel Observateur about Tunisia’s police state. A permanent cordon of plain-clothes police is...

Elena Kostyuchenko, a reporter for the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, and Yury Timofeyev, a reporter for Prague-based Radio Liberty, were arrested while covering the violent dispersal of environmentalists who had camped out at Khimki forest, north of Moscow, in an attempt to prevent part of it being torn down, according to Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). Kostyuchenko and Timofeyev were taken to a...