Censored

On 19 July 2007, police in Lusaka prevented Q-FM, a private radio station, from mounting their Outside Broadcasting (OB) equipment to cover live a demonstration organised by the OASIS forum and Collaborative Group on the Constitution, outside the gates of Parliament. Police said that the permit issued to the conveners of the demonstration did not include mounting the OB unit for live coverage of...

Reporters Without Borders today condemned the government’s decision to obstruct foreign and Burmese press coverage of a national convention that has the job of writing a new constitution. No foreign journalist has been given a visa, while Burmese journalists were granted only very limited access to yesterday’s opening session. “This convention is in fact an institutional sham, and the military...

(Mizzima/IFEX) - The Burmese junta has imposed restrictions on media coverage of the National Convention on the drafting of the constitution, to be held on 18 July 2007. Burma has been without a constitution since 1988, when its 1974 charter was suspended following a coup led by a new junta regime. In invitation letters to local media and foreign news agencies in Rangoon, the convening committee...

Iran's leading reformist daily newspaper Hammihan (Compatriot) has been ordered closed, less than two months after it was allowed to resume publishing. Hammihan, banned in 2000 by the hardline Iranian judiciary after the newspaper called for improving Iranian ties with the United States, had resumed publishing in May this year, publisher Gholamhossein Karbaschi told the Associated Press (AP). A...

Reporters Without Borders today condemned new media censorship in Yemen, where access to at least two websites has been blocked since the start of the year, in one case for three months, and the information ministry is now censoring the distribution of news to mobile phones by SMS message. “It is disturbing that the Yemeni government is attacking new technology in this way,” the press freedom...

Hundreds of protestors took to the streets after the Pakistan government blocked three private television news channels. Geo TV, Ary one TV, and Aaj TV said they had been kept off air because of their coverage of the political crisis over Musharraf's March 9 ouster of the country's chief justice, according to news reports. President Pervez Musharraf Monday imposed fresh curbs on the electronic...

Cable operators in Pakistan have decided to block transmissions of television channels broadcasting negative programmes against the "solidarity of Pakistan, armed forces and the judiciary." The Cable Operators Association of Pakistan (CAP) Saturday announced that it could not become a party to the "campaign of TV channels." The chairman of the association, Khalid Shaikh, said cable operators were...

Israeli army Tuesday conducted raids on five Palestinian radio and TV stations in West Bank city Nablus, according to news reports. Some of the stations have stopped broadcasting because the soldiers removed the necessary equipment. “There was no justification for these raids and, even less so, for the confiscation of transmitting equipment from these stations,” Reporters sans Frontières (RSF)...

The military government in Thailand closed down three community radio stations - Confidante, Taxi Driver Community Radio and Saturday Voice Against Dictatorship - just hours after they broadcast Thursday an interview with deposed prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra. The authorities have also charged them with violating “national security.” The night of the September 2006 coup, the military pulled...

The Singapore government has banned an independent film about a former top journalist and political activist who was held without trial for 17 years in the island republic, deeming the documentary to be "against public interests". Said Zahari with his wife. Zahari's 17 years by local filmmaker Martyn See is a 49-minute interview with Said Zahari about his arrest and subsequent detention under the...