Legal Action

The chairman-director of the Chitra group, publisher of daily Karavali Ale, who has been held in a defamation case, was brought to the court premises in handcuffs, tied to a chain held by a policeman in Karnataka's Udupi on Monday. BV Seetaram, who is also the editor-in-chief of the group, was declined bail as he feared arrest by the Mangalore police on other charges, the Hindu reported. “If I...

An Algerian court sentenced an editor-in-chief and a journalist at the Algiers-based independent daily El Watan to a three-month jail term each for defamation late last month. Omar Belhouchet, editor of El Watan, and reporter Salima Tlemcani, were found guilty on December 23 last of defaming a faith healer and Islam in a 2004 article about the "charlatan-like practices" of the Algiers healer, said...

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has condemned the ongoing legal harassment of BBC correspondent in Thailand, Jonathan Head. Police Lt Col Wattanasak Mungkandee filed a third criminal complaint this year against Head on December 23, alleging he had insulted the Thai monarchy in his reporting. The latest charges are related to a December 3 article in which Head speculated that the royal...

Ukraine's National Expert Commission on the Protection of Public Morality has ruled that the registration of daily Blik should be withdrawn and criminal proceedings brought against the newspaper. On October 23, the commission recommended that legal sanctions be taken against Blik, which is owned by Adevarul Holding, a Romanian media company, for publishing several photographs of half-naked women...

A Sri Lankan court has ruled that an alleged confession made by senior Tamil journalist JS Tissainayagam while detained by the Terrorism Investigation Division (TID) was voluntary and admissible as evidence in his trial on terrorism charges, according to delayed reports. It is widely believed that Tissainayagam was forced to make a statement to TID under extreme duress. Giving evidence in Colombo...

The US Supreme Court has refused to revive a defamation lawsuit against the New York Times by Steven Hatfill, the former government scientist who contended that he was defamed by a series of columns about the anthrax mailings of 2001. The court Monday, according to a Bloomberg News report, rejected Hatfill’s appeal in his suit against the New York Times Co stemming the columns by Nicholas Kristof...

Ecuadorian journalist Milton Chacaguasay Flores, editor and owner of weekly newspaper La Verdad, was sentenced to ten months in prison for committing libel against Judge Silvio Castillo. The sentence was issued by a criminal court in the province of El Oro on November 15, the Peru-based Instituto Prensa y Sociedad (IPYS) has reported. The journalist was arrested on November 30 and imprisoned at...

Fiji's interim government has asked the court to jail the publishers and editors of two of the country's daily newspapers for six months each and impose a fine of $1 million (approx. US$539,000) over their publication of a letter that criticised the High Court's validation of the 2006 military coup. The Fiji Times and Daily Post newspapers have published statements acknowledging their guilt on...

Nazif Iflasoglu, a reporter from the daily Radikal, has been acquitted of the accusation of "securing and spreading secret documents". He had faced the charges for publishing an article about the strategy of the Follow-Up Committee at the Prime Ministry regarding its fight against the radical Muslim Hizbullah Organization, the Istanbul-based IPS Communication Foundation (BIANET) has reported. The...

Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has condemned the judicial harassment of Freddy Aponte Aponte, a journalist based in the southern city of Loja who works for privately-owned radio station, Luz y Vida. After being given a six-month jail sentence on September 25 for allegedly slandering a former mayor of Loja, he has just learnt in prison that the ex-mayor is now suing him for a million dollars in...