Legal Action

Defamation charges have been filed against a Moroccan editor by a group that represents close relatives of King Mohamed VI. A Casablanca court has summoned the editor to appear on Tuesday, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). The charges against Driss Chahtan, managing editor of the independent weekly Al-Michaal, stem from a front-page story titled "The Scandals of the King's...

A magistrate's court in Dakar, the capital of Senegal, suspended on June 3 distribution of the June 2009 edition of L'Essentiel, a monthly current affairs magazine, and ordered its seizure over headlines on the cover page that the court claimed were an "insult" to President Abdoulaye Wade. According to the presiding magistrate, the headlines "Freemasonry: The Grand Lodge of France Conquers Senegal...

Nedim Sener, a reporter for the daily Milliyet, who has written a book about the murder of journalist Hrant Dink, faces up to 28 years in prison after police officers filed complaints against him, the IPS Communication Foundation (BIANET) has reported. Sener's book is titled The Dink Murder and Intelligence Lies. The book deals with the gendarmerie, police and national intelligence officers who...

A Slovak government agency should immediately drop a civil complaint against the daily SME that was filed when the newspaper refused to print a response to a column under a controversial right-of-reply law, the International Press Institute (IP) has demanded. The complaint, filed by the Inspectorate for the Environment, is the first time a civil case has been pressed against a newspaper under the...

Two American journalists went on trial trial Thursday in North Korea on accusations of illegal entry and "hostile acts" in a case that could send them to a labour camp for 10 years. US television journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling were on assignment for San Francisco-based Current TV when they were picked up on March 17. They were later charged with illegally entering the Democratic Peoples...

A district court judge in Baku has sentenced Nazim Guliyev, an editor and the founder of the pro-government newspaper Ideal, to six months in prison on defamation charges, the Azeri Press Agency (APA) reported. Guliyev was jailed immediately. Judge Elman Akhmedov imposed the sentence on Wednesday, although the accuser, Sabira Makhmudova, said she wanted to withdraw her complaint, APA reported...

Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has condemned journalist Elena Maglevannaya’s conviction by a court in the southern city of Volgograd of defaming the prison service in articles about torture in Russian prisons that she wrote for the website Vestnikcivitas. Some of the articles were about the case of Zubayr Zubayrayev, a young Chechen imprisoned in Volgograd. In a May 13 ruling, the court found...

An increasing number of lawsuits are being filed in Algeria against journalists for alleged defamation, Paris-based Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has eported. On May 11, Nedjar El Hadj Daoud, editor of the Al-Waha newspaper, was sentenced to six months in prison by the Ghardaïa court, confirming the 2007 and 2008 rulings. The sentence stemmed from the publication of a May 21, 2006 article...

Court proceedings have been initiated against five Moroccan journalists charged with "publicly harming" Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, left, and "hurting his dignity." The brief court hearing Monday, attended by a Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) representative, was adjourned until June 1 at the request of the journalists' lawyers, who learnt that the case was filed by the public prosecutor...

Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has called for the immediate release of Cuban independent journalist Alberto Santiago Du Bouchet, who was arrested after a verbal exchange with a policeman in Artemisa (in Havana province) on April 18. Du Bouchet, who is a reporter for Habana Press, an independent news agency, was previously jailed from August 2005 to August 2006 for a similar reason. “The brakes...