Local television stations in the southern Kyrgyz city of Osh were ordered to cease transmission on Friday by the city government in the wake of interethnic violence in the region, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Osh residents now have access only to the state television channel, KTR, and several Russian television channels, the independent news agency Zpress reported. “We...
Venezuelan columnist Francisco “Pancho” Pérez has been sentenced to prison on defamation charges, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). On Friday, a court in Carabobo found Pérez, a columnist with the daily El Carabobeño, guilty of defaming Valencia’s mayor Edgardo Parra, the local press reported. He was sentenced to three years and nine months. In two columns published in...
The Dhaka high court has stayed the cancellation of Amar Desh’s licence for three months, which allowed the opposition daily to bring out an issue Friday for the first time in 10 days, according to Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). Amar Desh was back on the newsstands with a special four-page edition that was welcomed by the newspaper’s regular readers. In the same ruling, the high court also...
Charges of sedition have been brought against Mahmudur Rahman, the chief editor of the opposition daily Amar Desh, according to Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). A national daily, the now closed Amar Desh is close to the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party. “In the space of a few days, Rahman has been accused of fraud, obstructing the police, printing an outlawed group’s posters and now...
A Yemeni court specialising in press cases on June 8 abandoned eight prosecutions against 33 journalists in line with a previously announced amnesty by President Abdullah Saleh to mark the 20th anniversary of the unification of north and South Yemen. In his June 8 announcement, justice minister Ghazi Chaif Al-Agbari said the decision to suspend legal proceedings concerned journalists prosecuted on...
Radio journalist Oswaldo Pereyra Moreno was on Wednesday sentenced to one year in prison on criminal defamation charges in San Lorenzo, northern Peru, according to Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). The charges against Pereyra, host of the show 'Hora 13' on Radio Macarena, stemmed from a September 2009 broadcast about an illegal abortion allegedly given to an unnamed 14-year-old girl in a...
A suspended prison sentence was handed to a Gabonese journalist this week over an article raising questions about the unsolved murder of a government official, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). On Monday, a criminal court in the capital, Libreville, convicted Jonas Moulenda, a reporter with the state-owned daily L’Union, on charges of criminal defamation and gave him a...
Istanbul’s Yargıtay High Court handed down on Friday a 15-month prison sentence to Turkish journalist Irfan Aktan, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Aktan was found guilty of “producing terrorist propaganda” in an article published in an issue of the biweekly Express in October 2009. The article described scepticism among Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) members toward a...
Two newspapers in sudan failed to appear on newsstands over the weekend, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Sudanese authorities blocked printing of the opposition weekly Al-Maidan late Saturday after its staff failed to provide security personnel with an advance copy of the paper, Al-Maidan journalist Abdelgadir Mohammed Abdelgadir told CPJ. Abdelgadir said government...
Veteran Zambian Editor Fred M’membe was sent to prison Friday following his sentencing for contempt of court sparked by an op-ed on the state’s prosecution of a journalist, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Having convicted M’membe earlier this week, Magistrate David Simusamba sentenced the the editor-in-chief of Zambia’s largest newspaper, The Post, to four months in prison...
