State Persecution

The 66-year-old editor of the daily al-Ayyam, Hisham Bashraheel, was arrested on January 6, the day after the security forces lifted a 24-hour siege of his newspaper in Aden, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. One of his sons, managing editor, Hani Bashraheel, was also arrested at the same time. Another son of Hisham Bashraheel, Mohammed Hisham Bashraheel, was arrested on January 5. It...

A court in Chadian capital N’Djamena on Thursday found the privately owned weekly La Voix “not guilty” of charges against it and lifted a provisional order for automatic seizure of all copies of the paper made on December 3, 2009, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. An appeal will be heard on January 13. “We are already preparing our next issue and we think we should be able to publish...

Repeated death threats have been made against a critical Tunisian journalist living in France. Slim Bagga, former editor of the now-defunct opposition monthly L’Audace, told the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) the latest threat arrived at his Paris home in December in the form of a letter mailed from Lebanon and signed by a man claiming he is a Palestinian refugee living in northern Lebanon...

A court has imposed a 20-year jail sentence on Hla Hla Win, a freelance video reporter who provided material to the Burmese exile broadcaster Democratic Voice of Burma. Detained since September, she was already given a seven-year sentence in October, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) and Burma Media Association (BMA) have reported. “People had been expecting signs of an opening and goodwill gestures...

Police on Tuesday lifted a siege of the newspaper al-Ayyam, after 24 hours of clashes between security forces and the newspaper’s own armed guards. Sources contacted by Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) said that two people were killed in the confrontation, one newspaper guard and one member of the security forces. Seven more were injured. Witnesses said that a guard mortally wounded a police...

Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has condemned Yemen’s attempt to use the current anti-terror push to crush human rights after security forces today fired on a crowd of protestors staging a ‘sit-in’ outside the offices of a banned newspaper. “The Ali Abdallah Saleh government is taking advantage of support from foreign powers in the fight against terrorism on its soil to deliberately violate people...

This has been a grim year for Yemen’s independent press, the victim of an media war waged by the government under the guise of combating terrorism and sedition, and the situation could get even worse in 2010, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) said Thursday, following the arrests of two more journalists in the past four days. The first of the past week’s media arrests was that of Khalid Jahafi, a...

A new criminal charge has been filed against imprisoned Azerbaijani editor Eynulla Fatullayev, a 2009 recipient of CPJ’s International Press Freedom Award. Based on Fatullayev’s account and the government’s long record of persecuting the editor, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) believes the charge to be fabricated. On Tuesday, guards at Prison Colony No 12 in Baku claimed...

The Iranian government, struggling to silence the many critical voices in the country, has arrested 11 journalists since Sunday, including former International Press Freedom Award recipient Mashallah Shamsolvaezin and the prominent writer Emadeddin Baghi, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has reported. CPJ condemned the arrests and called for the release of all detained...

A Cameroonian newspaper editor, jailed this month after publishing a book excerpt that alleged sexual activities by President Paul Biya, was convicted on Monday of “insulting the head of state.” Judge Ibrahim Ba sentenced Jean-Bosco Talla, managing editor of the weekly Germinal, to a one-year suspended term and a fine of 3.15 million CFA francs (US$6,800), the paper’s editor-in-chief, Duke...