Reporters Without Borders voices its support for the tributes being paid in Paris to Lebanese journalist Samir Kassir on 4 June, to mark the second anniversary of his car-bomb murder in Beirut on 2 June 2005. A meeting is to be held at the Arab World Institute in Paris. At the same time, the press freedom organisation wonders why the investigation into his death is so slow and why no one has yet...
The Liberian government has lifted with immediate effect the ban it imposed on the Independent Newspaper. On February 27th, this year, the Government of Liberia through the Ministry of Information revoked the operational permit of the paper when it published what the Ministry described as obscene materials depicting former Presidential Affairs Minister Willis Knuckles having sex with two ladies...
MOSCOW: Novaya Gazeta, an independent Russian newspaper, officially began sales on Wednesday of a bound collection of articles and commentary by Anna Politkovskaya, the paper's special correspondent who was murdered last year. The book was released as the paper's editors and staff once again demanded an honest investigation into the crime. Politkovskaya, 48, was one of fiercest domestic critics to...
(RSF/IFEX) - Reporters Without Borders is outraged at the two-month prison sentences imposed on two "El Watan" journalists in a libel case on 27 May 2007 and said it was concerned about the verdict that is due to be issued by an Algiers criminal court on 30 May in the case of Arezki Aït-Larbi, the correspondent of several international news media. "Algeria's journalists will always work under the...
New York, May 30, 2007—Blanket censorship imposed last November on private newspapers and radio stations was lifted this week after a six-month state of emergency, imposed in response to deadly unrest in eastern Chad, expired on Saturday, according to officials and local journalists. Three of the leading private newspapers in the capital N’Djamena, including weeklies Notre Temps, Le Temps and L...
Hundreds of journalists from around the world gathered Monday for a congress held in Moscow as part of an effort to promote Russian press freedom and fight impunity enjoyed by the killers of Russian journalists. But with few government officials in attendance, the effort is off to a bad start. By choosing Moscow for its meeting, the Brussels-based International Federation of Journalists wants to...
Reporters Without Borders today condemned constant government harassment of the opposition media, which has led 14 journalists working for two dailies, the Azerbaijani-language Gundelik Azerbaijan and the Russian-language Realny Azerbaijan, to seek political asylum in the past four days after their newspapers were closed last week. The editor of the newspaper Nota Bene has also requested asylum...
(BIANET/IFEX) - The weekly magazine "Nokta" was forced to close in April 2007. It now faces a court case under Article 301 for an interview with security expert Lale Sariibrahimoglu and a follow-up article, both of which criticised the involvement of the army in domestic affairs. Ahmet Sik, the reporter who conducted the interview, and Lale Sariibrahimoglu are being tried at a penal court in...
KHULNA, Bangladesh (Reuters) - A Bangladesh court sentenced a journalist to four years in prison on Monday for taking bribe from forest officials, lawyers said. They said security forces had arrested A.T.M. Rafique, who worked in southwestern Khulna district for a Dhaka-based daily newspaper, in early April while accepting 20,000 taka ($290) from two officials of Bangladesh Forest Department. "The...
MOSCOW -- More than 80 journalists have been murdered for their work in Russia since 1993, the world's largest journalists' organization said Monday. Of 289 journalists killed in Russia over the last 14 years, "more than 80 of the deaths resulted from the work the journalists were doing directly," said John Crowfoot, researcher at the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ). Speaking at the...
