State Persecution

Officials shut down the office of the Association of Iranian Journalists in Tehran on Wednesday night, just after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was sworn in for a second term, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has reported. Director Badr al-Sadat Mufidi, told the BBC Persian service that agents stormed the office with a warrant from Saeed Mortazavi, Tehran's prosecutor general. The...

A Gambian court has sentenced six journalists to two years in jail and imposed heavy fines on them on six counts of sedition and criminal defamation. Failure to pay the fines will lead to an additional two years in jail. The six journalists, working for two private newspapers—the Point and Foroyaa—had republished a June 11 Gambian Press Union statement criticising President Yahya Jammeh's comments...

The news editor of Zambia's largest newspaper went on trial Wednesday on charges of distributing pornographic images. Chansa Kabwela, 29, a news editor at the Post newspaper, distributed the photos of the woman giving birth in the car park outside Lusaka's University Teaching Hospital in June. The trial commenced with the state prosecutor complaining about comments by Reporters sans Frontières...

Uzbek authorities should immediately free the independent journalist Dilmurod Saidov, sentenced Thursday last to 12 1/2 years in prison following a flawed trial brought on politically motivated charges, Human Rights Watch has said. The trial was riddled with procedural violations, and several witnesses ultimately withdrew their testimony, saying they had given false evidence, rendering his...

Slovenia has charged Finnish journalist Magnus Berglund with two counts of criminal defamation after a documentary he produced quoted unnamed sources as saying that members of the former Slovene government – including former Prime Minister Janez Jansa – accepted bribes in arms deals with Finnish arms maker Patria. Berglund made the allegations in a September 2008 documentary produced by Finland’s...

The trial of Sudanese journalist Lubna Hussein, who faces 40 lashes after being arrested a month ago for wearing trousers, has been postponed, again, until September 7, according to International Press Institute (IPI) fellow Vuslat Dogan Sabancı, who was in Khartoum for the hearing. The delay in Hussein’s trial is apparently designed to give the judges time to decide whether Hussein’s job as a UN...

Moroccan authorities banned two magazines from newsstands over the weekend after they published a poll about the 10-year reign of King Mohammed VI. Official MAP news agency said independent weeklies, Tel Quel, a French-language publication, and Nichane, an Arabic-language magazine, were seized for failing to respect the 1958 press code. Communications Minister Khalid Naciri told the Associated...

Zimbabwean authorities have issued an operating licence to a local newspaper group forced to close down by the state five years ago, a move which suggests the new unity government intends to open up the media. A special committee set up by the Information Ministry nearly two years ago said the Associated Newspapers of Zimbabwe (ANZ) was free to resume operations, according to zimguardian.com. ANZ...

The Venezuelan government has withdrawn the licences of 34 radio and TV stations, 13 of which already stopped broadcasting earlier. When the authorities announced the withdrawal of 34 broadcast media licences on August 2, they warned that 200 other radio and TV stations could suffer the same fate. Diosdado Cabello, the minister who supervises the National Telecommunications Commission (Conatel)...

Eight newspaper publishers were interrogated by the Niamey police on August 1 at the behest of the President’s son for publishing a document accusing him and another person of taking kickbacks, Reporters Sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. After being questioned, two of the publishers were taken into custody in connection with another case and were due to appear before prosecutors on August 5....