The Valle del Cauca department in western Colombia has one of the highest rates of press freedom violations in the country, forcing journalists into silence, the Foundation for Press Freedom (Fundación para la Libertad de Prensa, FLIP) has found. According to the analysis, from 2003 to mid-2007, 50 violations were documented: 35 journalists were threatened, five of whom fled into exile; and three

Civil society groups in more than 60 countries celebrated the International Right to Know Day on September 28. Documentation of the past year's achievements of the right to access government information in various countries were released by ARTICLE 19, Privacy International, and the Open Society Justice Initiative. "Although the global movement suffered setbacks in 2007, the bottomline is that

Press freedom and human rights organisations have renewed calls for a thorough investigation into the murder of crusading Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya and an end to impunity. October 7 marked the first anniversary of the brutal murder of Politkovskaya, a renowned Kremlin critic who exposed human rights abuses by Russian forces in Chechnya. Politkovskaya, who worked with the Novaya Gazeta

Twenty members of the International Freedom of Expression eXchange (IFEX) have set up a Burma Action Group to support protesters and journalists in their struggle against the recent military crackdown in the country. Participants at the IFEX general meeting last week in Montevideo, led by Soe Myint of Burmese exile-run news agency Mizzima News, called for a factfinding mission to the notoriously

Slovenian journalists have decided to go to town over the President’s attempt to control newsrooms. A petition against censorship and political pressures on journalists in Slovenia has been signed by 438 journalists from major media outlets in Slovenia and sent to the governments of all European Union member states. The petition cites instances of censorship against individual journalists who

The Internet has not yet become an effective tool for human rights in the Arab world, says a recent study by the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (HRinfo). The 215-page study, 'Electronic Media and Human Rights', is the first in Arabic to discuss human rights in the discourse of electronic Arabic media outlets. It also surveyed use of the Internet by human rights organisations. Although

The nondescript town of Oaxaca, about 520 km southeast of capital Mexico City, has been gathering a lot of international media attention for all the wrong reasons. Three distributors of the newspaper El Imparcial del Istmo were attacked and shot dead on October 8 on a highway in Oaxaca, following weeks of threats made to the paper, the National Centre for Social Communication (Centro Nacional de