Follow-up

The Sudanese justice system has decided to keep Abuzar Ali Al-Amin, the deputy editor of the opposition daily Rai Al-Shaab, in prison and to bring new charges against him based on complaints made by the security services, according to Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). Arrested in May 2010, Al-Amin was given a five-year jail sentence in July 2010 which the supreme...

Erwin Arnada, the former editor of the Indonesian version of Playboy magazine, was released June 24 after the supreme court accepted his appeal against a two-year jail sentence on a charge of indecency, overturning its own decision. He began serving the sentence last October. “Now it is proved, I am not guilty, journalism is not a crime,” Arnada said in his first Tweet after being freed from...

Six contributors to opposition radio station La Voix de Djibouti – Farah Abadid Hildid, Houssein Ahmed Farah, Houssein Robleh Dabar, Abdillahi Aden Ali, Moustapha Abdourahman Houssein and Mohamed Ibrahim Waïss – were finally released June 23 evening after more than four months in Djibouti’s Gabode prison. After several appeals to Djibouti’s supreme court, an appeal court ruled on June 22 that they...

Video footage of a Tamil journalist apparently executed in the final stages of Sri Lanka's bloody civil war underscores the need for an urgent international inquiry, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. The UK's Channel 4 has screened amateur footage of the body of Tamil news presenter Shoba, indicating that she was shot and killed during the government's final military surge in the...

As investigative journalists Ahmet Sik and Nedim Sener completed their 100th day in prison, hundreds of people marched down Istanbul’s Istiklal Avenue on June 18 to demand their release and the release of all the other journalists detained in Turkey. It was the third big march since their arrest on March 6. There is no sign of any weakening in support for Sik and Sener, whose fourth request for...

Belarusian authorities must end the retaliatory prosecution of Andrzej Poczobut, a Grodno-based correspondent for the largest Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza, and release him immediately, New York-based press freedom group Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has demanded. Authorities put Poczobut on trial today in the western city of Grodno, local and international press reported. The trial is a...

Justice has been served in the case of murdered journalist Chauncey Bailey. On June 9, an Alameda County jury convicted Yusuf Bey IV and his accomplice Antoine Mackey, both 25, of the murder of journalist Chauncey Bailey on August 2, 2007. Mackey and Bey IV had pleaded not guilty to all charges. The jury started deliberating on May 23. Bailey, 57, was shot to death as he walked to his job at the...

It has been exactly 500 days since Sri Lankan journalist Prageeth Eknelygoda disappeared. He has not been seen by his wife Sandhya Eknelygoda or by the couple's two teenage sons, Sanjay and Harith, since he left for work around 7:30 a.m., on the morning of January 24, 2010. Sandhya filed a complaint with the local police office at 11:30 a.m. the next day but so far no government official has given...

The trial of three people accused of killing Kyrgyz journalist Gennady Pavlyuk in the Kazakh capital of Almaty in December 2009 by throwing him from the 6th floor of a building opened two days ago in Almaty. At the time of his death, Pavlyuk had been given the job of creating a news website and a weekly newspaper for the Kyrgyz opposition party Ata-Meken. “The decision to hold an open trial at the...

The two men who murdered journalist Birendra Shah have been awarded life imprisonment. A judge in the central Bara district sentenced Mainejar Giri and Ram Ekwal Sahini to life terms and confiscated their property on May 30, according to local news reports. The two abducted and killed Shah, a local correspondent for the Nepal FM radio station, Dristi Weekly, and Avenues TV, on October 4, 2007...