State Persecution

The US State Department has reversed its decision to deny a visa to a leading Colombian journalist whose reporting has been highly critical of the country's US-allied president. Morris, his wife and their two children can now travel to Harvard for a yearlong Nieman Foundation fellowship for mid-career journalists. "Happy, happy! This was terrible," a relieved Hollman Morris, an independent TV...

A jailed Iranian journalist has warned that if his complaint against Iran's supreme leader, president, and chief prosecutor is not pursued he will appeal to international bodies, RFE/RL's Radio Farda has reported. Isa Saharkhiz said in an open letter on July 25 that if the head of Iran's judiciary, Ayatollah Sadeq Larijani, did not take action on his grievance in the coming month he would take his...

Iranian reporter Hamid Massouminejad is no longer under house arrest in Milan. Mohammadali Hosseini, Iran's ambassador to Italy, told the Iranian Students News Agenc (ISNA) that the Milan prosecutor signed the order of release which was also approved by the court interrogator on Monday. Hosseini announced that this did not mean that the file has been closed by described it as a "positive step"...

A member of Swaziland’s royal family has made death threats and outrageous claims against local journalists over their critical coverage of the country's leadership. During a July 21 public forum called the Smart Partnership National Dialogue in the central commercial city of Manzini, Prince Mahlaba, brother of Swaziland’s absolute ruler King Mswati III, was quoted by local media as saying: “I...

Abdolreza Tajik, an Iranian journalist and member of the member of the Human Rights Defenders Centre, has been the victim of mistreatment since his arrest on June 23. Relatives say that when they visited him for the first time in Evin prison on July 14, he told them he had been victim of violence in the presence of the Tehran deputy prosecutor-general during his first night in prison, according to...

An Abidjan criminal court has acquitted the editor, managing editor and publisher of the Nouveau Courrier d’Abidjan newspaper, who had been originally been charged with theft of an official document, publishing information about a judicial case that has not yet been tried and revealing a confidential document. The three journalists, editor Saint Claver Oula, publisher Stéphane Guédé and managing...

Iran has sentenced award-winning journalist Emadeddin Baghi to a year in prison and banned him from political activities for five years, an opposition website has reported. Baghi, who is also a well-known human rights activist, has been "sentenced to one year in prison and banned from political activities for five years after a two-year trial for forming a group defending the rights of prisoners,"...

Officers from the Oluta municipal police force, in the state of Veracruz, recently abducted and attempted to kill Edgar Irán López Hernández, a reporter for the Órale newspaper. The incident took place on July 17 after López Hernández witnessed police officers and the municipality's mayor harassing another reporter, according to the Center for Journalism and Public Ethics (CJPE). At approximately...

A Chinese court in the restive western region of Xinjiang has given a Uighur journalist and website manager 15 years in jail for endangering state security by speaking to foreign journalists, his employer said on Friday. Uighurbiz.net, where Gheyret Niyaz worked as an administrator, posted a notice saying he had been sentenced at a hearing on Friday, quoting his wife who was in the court. "Gheyret...

Referans newspaper writer Cengiz Çandar is facing a prison sentence of between one and three years in Turkey over an allegation of "insulting a public servant in the commission of his duty". The charges are based on Çandar's criticism of the fact that a secret witness in the Hrant Dink murder case was not brought to the court in an February 8, 2010 hearing, according to IPS Communication...