State Persecution

Belarusian authorities must immediately stop harassing independent media outlets in retaliation for their critical reporting on the recent lethal bombing on the Minsk subway, New York-based press freedom group Community to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has demanded. Following the blast, authorities--including the Information Ministry, the general prosecutor's office, and the Belarusian security...

Haider Mohamed Al-Noaimi, a blogger and journalist who works for various media including the opposition newspaper Al-Wasat, was arrested by about 30 men who came to his home on the evening of April 24 and confiscated his computer and cameras before taking him away. They reportedly hit him during the raid. His Facebook profile, where he posted his articles, has been blocked since April 3. Another...

Security forces surrounded the home of Akhbar Al-Youm reporter Mohammed Al-Louzi for three hours on April 25 because of his coverage of current events in Yemen. Members of the Republican Guard stopped Abdel Aziz Al-Majidi, the editor of the newspaper Al-Shahid, at a checkpoint the same day, preventing him from entering Taiz province. Copies of his newspaper were seized at the same checkpoint the...

Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has condemned the recent arrests of Mohammad Seifzadeh, a human rights lawyer who has defended several imprisoned journalists, and Alireza Rajai, a journalist who writes for several reformist newspapers. A founder member of Nobel peace laureate Shirin Ebadi’s Centre for Human Rights Defenders, Seifzadeh managed to tell his family on...

The number of journalists in jail in Peru rose to two when Paul Garay Ramírez, a programme producer for Visión 47 TV and a correspondent for Radio La Exitosa, was sentenced to three years in prison by a court in the east-central region of Ucayali on April 19 for allegedly defaming a prosecutor. The other journalist currently detained is Oswaldo Pereyra Moreno of Radio Macarena, who was sentenced...

A leaked US defence department cable released Monday by WikiLeaks reveals that part of the US government’s motive for holding Sudanese cameraman Sami Al-Haj for six years at its Guantanamo Bay prison camp was the information he could provide about his employer, the Qatar-based satellite TV station Al-Jazeera. Arrested by Pakistani security forces on the Afghan-Pakistani border in December 2001, Al...

New York-based press freedom group Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has called on Bahraini authorities to disclose the whereabouts of Haidar Mohammed al-Nuaimi, a columnist for daily newspaper Al-Wasat. Roughly 30 uniformed and plainclothes police raided al-Nuaimi's family home in Manama April 25, dragging him into the street and beating him, local journalists told CPJ. Al-Nuaimi was then...

Anton Hammerl, a freelance South African photographer who was detained in early April, has appeared in government custody in Libya and is apparently in good health. Global Post told CPJ that the South African government has received information from Libyan authorities that Hammerl is well and will be permitted to speak to his family soon. Clare Morgana Gillis, an American freelancer for The...

Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has expressed mixed feelings over the Guinea Bissau government’s decision not to go ahead with a threat to suspend newspaper Última Hora as it seems to be no more than a stay of execution. At a news conference on April 20, presidency minister Maria Adiatu Djaló Nandigna issued a “vibrant appeal to the media, especially newspaper...

A bombing in the Minsk metro on April 11, which killed 13 people, has prompted a new round of official warnings to the Belarus news media similar to previous attempts to intimidate and silence them, Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has said. “We urge the government to stop the almost daily harassment and threats against journalists who are just trying to do their job...