Legal Action

A man said to be a close ally of President Yahya Jammeh of the Gambia has filed a lawsuit in the United States of America against the US-based online Freedom Newspaper, its editor Pa Nderry M'Bai, and Freedom Newspaper Incorporated, the publishers. Amadou Samba, a businessman and the publisher of pro-government Banjul-based Daily Observer newspaper, is demanding that Freedom Newspaper make public...

Togo's President, Faure Essozimna Gnassingbé, has filed three more defamation suits against two privately-owned newspapers. Two of the suits were brought against the weekly L'Indépendant Express. This brings to three the number of cases that President Gnassingbé has launched against L'Indépendant Express since August 18. The Media Foundation for West Africa's (MFWA) correspondent in Togo reported...

The International Press Institute (IPI) has expressed grave concern for the state of media freedom in Ukraine after a court ruling forced one TV station off the air and limited the licences of another. At a hearing in Kiev on Monday, August 30, the two privately-run TV channels, TVi and 5 Kanal, were told their broadcast frequencies would be cancelled after the court found in favour of allegations...

The judge for the Specialized Interdistrict Economic Court of Almaty, Gulnar Meyrzhanova, has dismissed the charges in a lawsuit filed against the independent Kazakh newspaper Central Asia Monitor for "protection of honour, dignity and business reputation". The judge on August 23 also ordered the release of the newspaper's seized property, Almaty-based press freedom group Adil Soz has reported. On...

Lisbon-based weekly Sol has been fined 1.5 million euros for defying a court injunction obtained by Rui Pedro Soares, the Portuguese government's former representative on the board of the national telecommunications company Portugal Telecom, not to publish details from phone conversations recorded in a police surveillance operation. Soares obtained the injunction on February 11 in response to a...

Trumped-up charges of extremism have been pressed in Kyrgyzstan against Ulugbek Abdusalomov, the editor of an independent newspaper, and Azimjon Askarov, a journalist and human rights defender, according to press freedom group Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Prosecutors in the southern city of Jalal-Abad charged Abdusalomov, editor of the Uzbek-language newspaper Diydor, and Askarov, head...

The Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) has sued magazine Rojname for $1 billion. A report published in the magazine on July 20 had accused the KDP and its ruling coalition partner, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), of helping smuggle refined petroleum products into Iran in violation of the international sanctions imposed on the Islamic Republic by the UN Security Council. The article accused the...

The Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) led by Masoud Barzani, president of the Kurdish Regional Government, is pursuing a defamation complaint against an opposition weekly, Rozhnama. The complaint, filed under Saddam Hussein-era criminal statutes, seeks US$1 billion in damages and the closing of the newspaper, according New York-based press freedom group Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). "It...

The department of public prosecution has brought new charges against Kurdish writer Mehmet Güler and publisher Ragip Zarakolu. This time they are to be prosecuted for a book about the political system that the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) would like to introduce, Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. In a trial due to begin on September 30 before...

Criminal proceedings have been initiated in Dresden against two Leipzig journalists. The charges arise from articles written in news magazine Der Spiegel and in Zeit Online in 2008 on the “Saxony Corruption Quagmire” – a possible corruption affair that could have involved high-ranking members of the legal system. Ginzel and Datt were the authors of the Zeit Online report and co-authors of the...