State Persecution

There have been renewed cases of threats and physical violence against Bulgarian journalists in the past few days, according to Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). An assault on TV reporter Dimitar Varbanov on February 10 and a police spokesman’s threats against news agency reporter Ivan Yanev in the city of Stara Zagora on February 8 show that a climate of intimidation continues. These incidents and...

Mallam Tukur, the editor-in-chief and publisher of the independent weekly, Desert Herald, based in Kaduna State of Nigeria has been arrested for defamation, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Two plainclothes police arrested Tukur on defamation charges at his office in Kaduna on February 8 and took him to a police station in Bauchi State. He was released on bail the following...

Two journalists have disappeared in Sri Lanka, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Chandana Sirimalwatte, chief editor of the Sri Lankan weekly newspaper Lanka, was detained by police around noon on January 30, according to his wife, Hemali Abeyratne, and staffers at the paper. Lanka e News journalist Prageeth Eknaligoda has been missing since January 24. Lanka, the weekly...

A state security court prosecutor in Amman on Thursday ordered newspaper columnist Mwaffaq Mahadin and Sufian Tell, a specialist in environmental issues, held for 15 days for criticising the assistance which the Jordanian intelligence services provide the United States in its fight against Al-Qaeda, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. Mahadin, who writes for the daily Al-Arab Al-Yawm...

Ten journalists who went to cover a major Israeli military operation in the Shu’fat refugee camp, in East Jerusalem, were targeted by Israeli soldiers firing tear-gas grenades, stun grenades and rubber bullets on February 8 and 9, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. Many journalists were wounded while covering the Israeli search and arrest operation in the refugee camp on February 8. As...

Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has voiced relief at the release Wednesday of photographer Umida Akhmedova but expressed dismayed at the “extremely dangerous precedent” set by the Tashkent court which found her guilty of “slander” and “insulting the Uzbek people”. The court convicted her only two days into her trial but immediately released her on the grounds that she was eligible under an amnesty...

A court court in the Almaty district of Medeu rescinded the order it issued a week earlier banning all of the Kazakh media from publishing any information that could damage the reputation of President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s son-in-law, businessman Timur Kulibayev. The Medeu district court issued the ban on February 1 in response to the legal action which Kulibayev brought against four independent...

Iraqi photographer, Ibrahim Jassam, of Reuters, who had been held by the US military since his arrest on September 1, 2008, was released Wednesday. Jassam was arrested by the US military in Mahmudiyah, 30 km south of Baghdad, and was held at Camp Cropper, near Baghdad airport. Iraq’s central criminal court on November 30, 2008 said he had no case to answer and must be released, but the US army...

Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has called on Cameroon's National Security Chief Emmanuel Edou to immediately explain what has happened to two journalists, Simon Hervé Nko’o and Serge Sabouang, who were arrested by members of the General Directorate for External Investigation (DGRE), an intelligence agency, on February 5. There has been no news of them since then. “The unacceptable manner in which...

The Day of the Journalist that Colombia celebrates Tuesday will inevitably be overshadowed by the fact that press freedom is making no progress. Despite government boasts about “successful” measures for protecting the media, endangered journalists insist that they are not any safer and this will not change until the president takes a clear position, according to Reporters sans Frontières (RSF)...