Follow-up

Moroccan reporter Mostapha Hurmatallah of the weekly Al Watan Al An has been freed on completing his prison sentence. He had been in Casablanca's Oukacha prison since February 19, when Morocco's highest court of appeal ordered him to go back to jail to serve the rest of a seven-month term. Hurmatullah was released on July 25. "We welcome Hurmatallah's release with joy, but we reiterate our firm...

There was a dramatic end to the Globecast Satellite trial on July 24 when Harare Magistrate Archie Wochiunga refused to place the South African company on further remand after the state applied for a postponement of the matter, according to the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA). Prosecutor Florence Ziyambi had applied to have the matter postponed arguing that her witness had failed to turn...

Tunisian journalist Slim Boukhdir has been released from prison four months before the end of his sentence. The freelance journalist, set free on July 21, was held since November 26, 2007 in very harsh prison conditions at the civil jail in Sfax, 230 km south of the capital. Boukhdir, 39, is correspondent for the pan-Arab London-based newspaper al Quds al Arabi and for the website of satellite...

US human rights lawyers charged Sunday that US military prisons are "legal black holes" and the force is detaining journalists to "shut people up" about activities in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Agence France-Presse (AFP) has reported. A vast detention camp planned for the main US base in Afghanistan will be a "second Guantanamo" where laws do not apply, they said at a press conference about an...

An Afghan journalist, Rahmatullah Naikzad, has been freed after his pictures and video footage of 2 women brazenly executed by the Taliban led intelligence officials to hold him for questioning for two days, the Associated Press (AP) has reported. The pictures and footage of the slain women were aired internationally and in Afghanistan, prompting widespread anger in Afghanistan over the killings...

The Supreme Court of Tajikistan has postponed a trial of two suspects in the murder of Russian TV reporter Ilyas Shurpayev until July 22, a defence lawyer said on Friday, according to a RIA-Novosti report. Shurpayev, a reporter from Russia's volatile North Caucasus republic of Daghestan, who worked for Russia's state-run Channel One, was found stabbed and strangled in his rented Moscow apartment...

Spanish authorities have decided to reactivate the investigation into the 2004 murder of Antena 3 correspondent Ricardo Ortega, who was fatally shot in Haiti while covering the ouster of former President Jean Bertrand Aristide. As part of this process, Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) European consultant Borja Bergareche was one of several journalists who briefed Judge Pablo Ruz of the...

Simone Gbagbo, wife of Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo, and former Ivorian economy minister Paul-Antoine Bohoun Bouabré failed to respond to a summons from French investigating judge Patrick Ramaël for questioning on July 10 in Paris as witnesses in his probe into the disappearance of journalist Guy-André Kieffer, a dual French-Canadian national, in Côte d'Ivoire in 2004. Paris-based Reporters...

Iranian-Canadian photographer Zahra Kazemi died five years ago on July 10, 2003 from a cerebral haemorrhage following beatings she received in Evin prison, Tehran. In January, the Supreme Court ordered a retrial because of irregularities that affected the appeal court's verdict in November 2005. "Five years after the death of Zahra Kazemi and despite the decision to reopen the case, we have...

Fourteen media outlets have been fined in 2008 by the electoral courts for publishing interviews with those seeking office in the upcoming municipal elections, scheduled for October, or in some cases, even just their photographs. Electoral judges deemed that the media outlets and the politicians were carrying out election advertising before July 6, the official starting date of the campaign...