State Persecution

The Bahraini government has decided to indefinitely suspend Al-Jazeera from reporting from the Gulf kingdom, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). On Tuesday, Bahrain’s Ministry of Culture and Information decided to “temporarily freeze the activities of the Bahrain bureau of the Qatari satellite news channel Al-Jazeera for having violated professional norms and for failing to...

Kuwaiti authorities have detained freelance opposition journalist Mohammed Abdulqader al-Jassem since Sunday on charges of “instigating to overthrow the regime,” “slight to the personage of the emir” and “instigating to dismantle the foundations of Kuwaiti society,” the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has reported. Al-Jassem is facing multiple charges in five other complaints and was...

A raid was conducted in Madagascar Saturday on the opposition radio station Fréquence Plus that resulted in the arrest of an opposition leader while he was on a live radio programme, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has reported quoting local journalists. The soldiers injured three journalists and destroyed the station’s equipment in 67 Hectares, a district in the capital, Antananarivo...

The Sudanese government has shut down opposition daily Rai al-Shaab and arrested three of its journalists, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Security forces raided Rai al-Shaab’s offices in Khartoum on Sunday morning, confiscating copies and equipment and stopping all printing, according to local and international news reports. Deputy Editor Abu Zar al-Amin and two reporters...

Vedat Kursun, the former editor of Turkey’s only Kurdish-language daily, Azadiya Welat, was on Thursday given a sentence of 166 years and six months in prison by a court in the southeastern city of Diyarbakir, according to Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). Kursun was convicted under articles 314-3 and 220-6 of the criminal code and article 7-2 of the anti-terrorism law on charges of membership of...

Five years ago, on May 13, 2005, Uzbek authorities fired on a crowd in Andijan, in the eastern Ferghana Valley and expelled journalists from the city to prevent them covering the atrocities taking place there. It will always be a black day in the history of human rights violations in Uzbekistan. Uzbek President Islam Karimov rightly continues to appear in the updated list of “Predators of Press...

On May 2, the Press and Publications Court in Sana’a found Hussein Muhammad al-Leswas, editor of the news website Sana Press, guilty of “undermining national foundations, the revolution, and the republic” and sentenced him to one year in prison, according to local press reports and freelance journalist Samia al-Aghraby. The court also instituted an open-ended reporting ban against al-Leswas...

Two journalists have been freed in Yemen during the past 24 hours. Al-Ayyam editor Hani Bashraheel, who was arrested on January 6, and Moaz Ashhabi, who was sentenced to a year in prison on January 16, were freed on Monday, according to Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). But a harsh crackdown on independent and opposition media continues, with another journalist, Hossein Al-Leswas, getting a one...

The Inter American Press Association (IAPA) has criticised a "highly surprising" court decision against Panamanian newspaper La Prensa that ordered payment of US$300,000 in damages to a former public prosecutor for libel after the newspaper published official reports on irregularities that took place under her watch. On April 30, Second Civil Circuit Court Judge Miriam Cheng de Aguilar ordered La...

The climate continues to be very oppressive for Palestinian journalists, who are still subject to arrests, physical attacks and searches as a result of tension between the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, according to Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). In one of the latest incidents, Samer Rwayched, a correspondent of Sawt Al-Aqsa (a radio station linked...