State Persecution

Colleagues of a Guinean radio journalist who was attacked by unknown assailants on July 16 are suspecting the military of being behind the attack. Etienne Mansaré, a military reporter of privately-owned Conakry-based Sabari FM, was stabbed in the back while on his way home after signing off from his political programme "Sous le Cocotier." "Mansaré must have been a victim of an action carried out...

An independent photographer and documentary filmmaker was detained and assaulted and his camera was confiscated by officers from the National Institute for Migration in Mexico. Irineo Mújica Arzate was documenting on July 16 a police action in Soltepec, Puebla, to detain undocumented Central American workers who were travelling by train to the United States, the Center for Journalism and Public...

Threats have been made against the family of senior Sri Lankan journalist Gamini Pushpakumara. Pushpakumara, who is an executive committee member of the Sri Lanka Working Journalists' Association (SLWJA) and secretary of the program producers' union of the state-owned Sri Lanka Rupavahini Corporation (SLRC), was summarily dismissed from employment at SLRC after presidential elections in Sri Lanka...

Ato Kwamena Dadzie, news editor of Joy FM, an Accra-based independent radio station, was charged with a criminal offence for refusing to reveal the station's sources of information for a July 5 news item, according to the Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA). The station had carried a report to the effect that an umbrella body of local contractors, the Ghana Real Estates Developers Association...

A controversial article by writer Yilmaz Ozdil was within the "limits of press freedom", the Diyarbakir Public Prosecution in Turkey has decided. In the April 14 article, which was published in Hürriyet newspaper, Ozdil had defended a physical attack on Kurdish politician Ahmet Türk. The Press Council had previously reached a similar conclusion regarding Ozdil's column, IPS Communication...

Three Kurdish journalists were attacked while they were covering demonstrations by members of the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) in Istanbul and in Midyat, in the southeastern province of Mardin, on July 18, according to Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). The protests were prompted by reports that the bodies of several members of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), the Kurdish armed...

Azerbaijan’s representative to the European Court of Human Rights, Chingiz Askerov, has said that the reason his government appealed against the court’s April 22 ruling, calling for the release of imprisoned journalist Eynulla Fatullayev, was that it was “contrary to international norms.” Even if the court’s Grand Chamber upholds the original decision, Fatullayev will not be released without a...

Retired Panama journalist Carlos Núñez was released on July 14 after 19 days in detention, according to delayed reports received by Paris-based Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). Núñez was arrested on June 26 after being convicted in absentia as a result of a libel suit brought against him 10 years ago. At the time of his arrest, he was completely unaware he had been convicted over an article he...

Singapore released on bail Tuesday a British author arrested two days earlier as part of a criminal defamation investigation related to his book on the city-state's death penalty policy. Alan Shadrake, a 75-year old freelance journalist, posted $10,000 Singapore dollars ($7,250) bail, said his lawyer, M Ravi. Police confiscated Shadrake's passport, interrogated him about the book and will question...

Al-Mawkif, an opposition weekly belonging to the Progressive Democratic Party in Tunisia has apparently been censored, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Rachid Khechana, Al-Mawkif editor-in-chief, told CPJ that 10,000 copies of the newspaper’s Friday edition disappeared from newsstands, apparently confiscated by security agents. Although a small number of...