Press Freedom News

Cameroon authorities have lifted a ban on three private broadcasters summarily closed in connection with their critical coverage in February, but police are withholding equipment seized from one station, according to local journalists and news reports.

Equinoxe Télévision, sister radio station Radio Equinoxe, and Magic FM were authorized to return to air on July 4 by Communications Minister Jean Pierre Biyiti bi Essam. However, police continued to hold the broadcasting equipment of Magic FM, a popular station and partner of international U.S. broadcaster Voice of America.

All three stations were distinguished for their pointed political coverage of a national debate on constitutional reform marred by violence, according to local journalists.

We are relieved that Equinoxe Télévision, Radio Equinoxe, and Magic FM have finally been allowed to return to air, said Tom Rhodes, CPJ's Africa program coordinator: We call on the government to abandon such crude tactics of censorship like these arbitrary closures of media outlets, and ask that authorities to ensure that all of Magic FM's equipment is returned immediately.

Newspaper editor Ibrahim Eissa was sentenced by an Egyptian court to six months hard labor in jail for publishing an article last year about health problems facing Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak.

He was found guilty of damaging the national economy, although bankers have said it was difficult to link the drop in foreign investment at the time to the articles that were published.

Central Bank officials testified in court that investments of up to $350 million left the country on the days that Al-Dustour published the reports on the president's health.

Last year, Eissa was sentenced along with three other newspaper editors to a year in prison in a separate case for defaming Mubarak and his ruling National Democratic party. That trial also concerned newspaper articles about the president's health.

Eissa is one of the president's most outspoken critics. He has had run-ins with Egyptian authorities in the past. The paper was shut down for nearly seven years at one point.

The editor says the latest sentence sheds light on the limits to press freedom in Egypt. He says the verdict proves that Mubarak's government crushes the international right to freedom of expression.

Update: Appeal Result

3rd October 2008

The Boulak Abul Ela Appeal Court on the outskirts of Cairo reduced the six-month jail term given in March to Ibrahim Eissa, editor-in-chief of the independent daily Al-Dustour, to two months in prison for “publishing false information and rumors” about President Hosni Mubarak’s health. The court said Eissa’s August 2007 articles were likely to disturb public security and harm the country’s economy.

The verdict, which was issued amid tight security measures and heavy police presence both inside and outside the courtroom, took lawyers by surprise and prompted protests among journalists and human rights activists, who chanted anti-Mubarak slogans inside the courthouse.

Update: Pardoned

8th October 2008. Based on article from cpj.org

The Committee to Protect Journalists welcomes the presidential pardon today of a two-month jail sentence against Ibrahim Eissa, editor-in-chief of the independent daily Al-Dustour.

On September 28, a Court of appeal in Cairo reduced a six-month jail term given in March to Eissa to two months in prison for publishing false information and rumors about President Hosni Mubarak’s health. The court said Eissa’s August 2007 articles were likely to disturb public security and harm the country’s economy.

The presidential pardon coincide with Egypt celebrates the anniversary of a 1973 war against the state of Israel.

We are relieved that Ibrahim Eissa will not serve time in jail, said CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon. His sentence was nothing more than retaliation for reporting the government did not like.

Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi says his long-ruling coalition underestimated the power of the Internet, in advance of this month's elections. Badawi's ruling coalition suffered its worst losses in its history, after members of the opposition used the Internet to vent their views, circumventing the country's tightly controlled mainstream media.

Speaking to an investors' conference, the Malaysian leader said his coalition certainly lost the Internet war, and said it was a serious misjudgment for it to rely solely on government-controlled newspapers and television to get out its campaign message.

Many voters say they ignored the mainstream media and turned to independent blogsites like Malaysiakini.com, where they could see news on official corruption, religious and racial tensions and other issues that the mainstream media often does not report.

Observers say readership of the country's independent blogsites has surpassed that of mainstream print media.

Malaysia's government does not openly censor blogsites, as part of promise it made in the 1990's to not interfere with the Internet. The promise was part of an effort to draw foreign investment in plans for a new high-tech industry corridor. The plans for the corridor have since stalled, leading media freedom advocates to worry about whether the government may soon start imposing restrictions on the Internet.

See full article from the Bangkok Post

Malaysia's new information minister has pledged not to impose curbs on bloggers, who have been accused by other government officials of spreading lies and undermining public stability.

Internet commentators played a key role in recent general elections by catering to voters who wanted an alternative source of news besides television and newspapers, Information Minister Ahmad Shabery Cheek told reporters.

The remarks by Ahmad Shabery reflect a softening in the government's stance toward bloggers. His predecessor and other officials have repeatedly criticized bloggers and warned that new laws could be crafted to rein in bloggers who dispense malicious or false rumors that could stir tensions.

Maktoobblog.com, one of the most popular Arab blogging platform, has been recently blocked in Yemen cutting off Yemeni Internet users from the more than 46960 Middle Eastern blogs the service hosts. Of these, 1226 are Yemeni blogs. All of them disappeared from the Yemeni Internet.

OpenNet Initiative testing has confirmed through technical investigation, that the blog hosting service has been blocked by Yemennet ISP, a service of the government’s Public Telecommunication Corporation (PTC):

Access is blocked to the entire domain maktoobblog.com, effectively to every blog hosted by the service.

This significant blocking is expected to hinder Internet users in Yemen from blogging and reading blogs because maktoobblog.com is home of one of the largest blogging communities in the Middle East and North Africa.

Cuba has blocked access to the country's most popular blog, signalling an apparent government crackdown on a new generation of cyber critics.

The blog, Generación Y, received 1.2m hits last month, but its writer, Yoani Sanchez, said Cubans could no longer visit her web page.

Attempts from the island to view desdecuba.com/generaciony and two other Cuban blogs which share the server in Germany prompt an error alert, though the site can be viewed outside Cuba.

Analysts said the crackdown underlined the communist authorities' determination to keep tight control despite some cautious moves towards economic reform and greater openness since Fidel Castro stood down, and his brother, Raúl, replaced him as president.

As the most-read blogger Sanchez, a philosophy graduate, who does not disguise her identity, was seen as a litmus test of official tolerance for dissent. I think this action is directed at a phenomenon that was getting out of their hands, she told the southern Florida newspaper the Sun-Sentinel. I don't think they're coming after me personally. I think they're moving against a phenomenon of which I am a part.

Her husband, Reynaldo Escobar, a journalist, said he was surprised the clampdown had not happened sooner: It's interesting that at a time when people are waiting for the government to lift restrictions, they would apply more restrictions.

Wikileaks has released 35 censored videos relating to the Chinese suppression of dissent in Tibet and has called on bloggers around the world to help drive the footage through the so called "Great Firewall of China".

The transparency group's move comes as a response to the the Chinese Public Security Bureau's carte-blanche censorship of youtube, the BBC, CNN, the Guardian and other sites carrying video footage of the Tibetan people's recent heroic stand against the inhumane Chinese occupation of Tibet.

Wikileaks has also placed the collection in two easy to use archives together with a HTML index page so they may be easily copied, placed on websites, emailed across the internet as attachments and uploaded to peer to peer networks.

Censorship, like communism, seems like a reasonable enough idea to begin with. While 'from each according to his ability and to each according to his need' sounds unarguable, the world has learned that these words call forth a power elite to administer them with coercive force. Such elites are quick to define the needs of their own members as paramount. Similarly 'from each mouth according to its ability and to each ear according to its need' seems harmless enough, but history shows that censorship also requires an anointed class to define this "need" and to make violence against those who continue talking. Such power is quickly corrupted.

See full article from the Guardian

Earlier this week the Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger, sent a formal letter of complaint to the Chinese embassy in London calling for access to the Guardian website to be restored and "henceforth unfettered".

Chinese authorities can censor online content internally using either an outright block on a specific website address, or using filtering technology that restricts access to individual online articles containing key words such as "Tibet" and "violence".

It has not been clear which technical restrictions the Chinese authorities have been using against international news websites.

However, according to reports from several internet users in China, the censorship appears to have become less draconian this week compared to the weekend, when the worst of the unrest in Tibet was taking place.

Videos on the Guardian website that had previously been inaccessible can now be viewed in China and users in major cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guilin have been able to access a range of online news stories on Tibet.

One Chinese technology blogger said that while access has improved it does not necessarily mean that the authorities have relented: Suppose there is less access from Chinese readers once they felt the site is hard to access. The censorship system will turn to other hot sites with higher sensitive hits automatically.

Niger’s official media censor summarily suspended the FM broadcasts of France-based Radio France Internationale (RFI) for three months. Authorities accused RFI of discrediting the government in connection with a day-long series of programs on Monday about the detention of RFI correspondent Moussa Kaka.

In a telephone interview with CPJ, Douda Diallo, the president of the country’s High Council on Communications, said RFI’s programs questioned the independence of Niger’s courts, and broadcast “falsehoods” over Kaka’s case “with a manifest intention to discredit Niger’s institutions.”

The re-suspension of RFI is a clear sign of an ongoing government policy to censor media outlets, whether local or foreign, for material deemed critical of the government, said CPJ’s Executive Director Joel Simon. We call on the authorities to reverse lift the ban on RFI and release its correspondent Moussa Kaka immediately.

Kaka, a veteran radio journalist distinguished for his coverage of several Tuareg rebellions since the 1990s, was arrested in September on anti-state charges over alleged links with a recent insurgency. Kaka had done exclusive interviews with rebel leaders last year, according to local journalists.

Russian blogger Savva Terentyev is being charged for inciting hatred toward the authorities for a post that, among other things, labeled the police uneducated representatives of the animal world.

Terentyev said that the charges were a result of a February 2007 posting in which he chastised local authorities for raiding an opposition newspaper.

Terentyev's comments, first published by The Associated Press, come amid a government crackdown on Russian internet and media outlets: They're trash - and those that become cops are simply trash, dumb, uneducated representatives of the animal world. It would be good if in the center of every town in Russia ... an oven was built, like at Auschwitz, in which ceremonially, every day, and better yet, twice a day ... the infidel cops were burnt. This would be the first step toward cleaning society of these cop-hoodlum scum.

Bahrain was urged yesterday to provide more protection for journalists by scraping the jail sentences in its Press law.

A report by Reporters Without Borders has issued calls for the authorities to implement legislative reforms they have been promising for years.

It also called upon them to fulfil their promises to allow more Press freedom. According to the report, reform of the Press law must not be abandoned for lack of political determination or because of pressure from the radical fundamentalists who form the majority in parliament.

The report calls also upon the government to put an end to the state monopoly on broadcasting. The organisation also urged the Information Ministry to show more restraint in its censorship of the Internet. Access to some web sites is banned. It should be the job of the courts, not the government, to regulate the Internet, the report said.

The report praised the freedom atmosphere in the Kingdom when compared to other GCC states, but highlighted that the Press freedom situation is far from satisfactory.

It appreciated the fact that no journalist has been imprisoned since March 1999, but highlights that the Press was still facing many problems. It claimed that restrictive laws and pressure from officials too often force journalists to exercise censorship.

An Iranian Baluch journalist and civil rights campaigner, Yaghub Mehrnehad, aged 28, has been sentenced to death for an unknown offence, after torture and an unfair trial conducted behind closed doors, according to Amnesty International.

His execution is imminent. He is likely to be hanged in public, using the barbaric slow strangulation method favoured by the Tehran regime. It is deliberately designed to maximise the pain and prolong the suffering of the victim.

The International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) and the World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT) have condemned the death sentence.

Mehrnehad is a journalist for the reformist newspaper, Mardomsalari (Democracy), and president of Sedaye Edalat (Voice of Justice), a lawful, government-registered cultural association in Iranian-occupied Baluchistan.

On February 19, the Iranian judicial authorities announced that Mehrnehad had been sentenced to death for belonging to the armed Jondollah organisation, also known as the Iranian Peoples' Resistance Movement. No evidence has been offered to substantiate this allegation. On the contrary, all Mehrnehad's activities have been lawful and peaceful.

His appeal against conviction has been fast-tracked, in violation of Iranian law, to prevent him from challenging what human rights organisations say is a grave miscarriage of justice.

...Read full article

Journalists throughout Europe, both east and west, are faced with a growing pattern of censorship and pressure including physical violence and intimidation, according to a survey by the Association of European Journalists (AEJ). What's more, the EU is failing to stand up for them, the AEJ adds.

The survey, presented on 28 February in Brussels, found media freedom in retreat across much of Europe and pointed to a number of abuses by governments, including interference in editorial policies and even threats and intimidation.

The AEJ survey, which covers 20 countries, listed a number of abuses including:

• Violence and intimidation (Russia, Armenia)
• assault against media independence by governments (Slovenia)
• political abuses, particularly in public broadcasting (Croatia, Slovakia, Poland
• commercial pressure and over-concentration in mainstream media (France, Italy).

William Horsley, the survey's editor, said: Governments across Europe are showing a marked trend to use harsher methods, including heavy official 'spin' and tighter controls on journalists' access to information in order to block media criticism.

And according to Horsley, the trend is not confined to the younger democracies of Central and Eastern Europe. The open confrontation between government and the media in Slovenia is mirrored in various ways in the UK, Ireland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, among others.

In Ireland, two senior journalists from The Irish Times are facing jail sentences for refusing to reveal their sources, the AEJ heard at a recent workshop in Dublin. In Slovakia, journalist Martin Klein was condemned for publishing a satirical article about a church leader, a ruling which was subsequently upheld by Slovakia's Supreme Court despite a judgement by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg which backed the journalist.

What's more, Horsley says media organisations themselves have to share part of the blame: European media have been too slow to comprehend and report the pattern of censorship, pressure and sometimes physical violence faced by journalists in every corner of Europe.

As for the European institutions – the Council, Commission and Parliament - Horsley said they had so far failed to stand up for media freedom.

Horsley told EurActiv: If the EU neglects its own doubtful record in protecting media freedoms at home it is obvious that governments elsewhere will not take very seriously its appeals to allow media freedom and independence there.

Armenian authorities should immediately lift restrictions on independent news reporting and the censorship of independent news Web sites, steps imposed when President Robert Kocharian declared a state of emergency on Saturday, the Committee to Protect Journalists said.

Kocharian declared a 20-day state of emergency after clashes between government troops and opposition supporters in the capital, Yereven. Protesters claimed that vote-rigging marred the February 19 presidential election that ended in victory for Kocharian’s hand-picked successor, Serzh Sarkisian. Hundreds of troops were deployed in Yerevan to clamp down on the demonstrations.

As part of the declaration, Kocharian ordered media outlets to cite only official sources when reporting on national politics. Several independent and opposition news Web sites that operate under Armenian domain names were also blocked. They included Web sites run by the pro-opposition news agency A1+ and the independent newspapers Aravot (Morning) and Aikakan Zhamanak (Armenian Time), according to the news agency Armenia Today. Armenia Today reported that local Internet users received a message that said: Warning! As ordered by a state decree, some informational Web sites will not be accessible.

The Armenian Service of the U.S.-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) was blocked within the country.

Cameroon police in the capital, Yaounde, today forced a popular radio station off the air and confiscated its equipment over commentary critical of the government during a call-in program.

Magic FM is the third broadcaster summarily closed by authorities within a week in response to critical coverage of public demonstrations fueled by a rise in prices and President Paul Biya’s bid to seek another term in office.

Editor-in-Chief Roger Kiyeck told CPJ that officers accused the station of “broadcasting irresponsibly,” and inciting tensions in connection with commentary critical of the government during his morning call-in program, Magic Attitude.

Magic FM, a leading station in Yaounde that partners with the U.S. government-funded Voice of America, is known for its pointed political coverage.

The closure of Magic FM followed last week’s back-to-back closures of leading broadcasters Equinoxe Television, and its sister station Radio Equinoxe, in connection with their pointed coverage of Cameroon’s national crisis.

Update: Condemned

10th May 2008

The British High Commissioner to Cameroon, H.E. Syd Maddicott, has vehemently condemned the ban government slammed on the Equinoxe Radio and Television in Douala and Magic FM radio in Yaounde: The cancelling of licenses of three broadcasting stations is an unwelcome move. Some have alleged that the stations in question were closed down simply because their editorial line opposed the constitutional amendment. If true this is a serious problem. The press cannot be truly free if they are only free to agree with those in power.

A media rights group says Burma's military government has ordered the weekly magazine Myanmar Nation to stop publishing and has arrested two of its employees.

The International Freedom of Expression Exchange said that the arrests of Thet Zin and Sein Win show that Burma continues to crack down on the independent media, despite plans for a constitutional referendum and other promises of reform. The group said the two are being held without charge.

Tuesday, a new law connected to Burma's upcoming constitutional referendum took effect. The new law says any Burmese citizen who gives public speeches or passes out leaflets against the referendum could face up to three years in jail.

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) condemns the Government of Fiji's deportation of a newspaper publisher and managing director, Russell Hunter, to Australia on February 26 after his paper published stories highlighting allegations of tax evasion by a government minister.

Hunter was at home when government officials arrived with a document citing his deportation. He was held overnight before being forced onto a flight to Sydney, without being given the opportunity to notify his family.

Hunter, an Australian citizen, was reportedly denied consular access and legal advice. Fiji's authorities did not advise the Australian Government of the deportation. It is understood Hunter's work visa had 18 months to run.

The action followed publication in Hunter's paper, the Fiji Sun, of allegations of tax evasion by a government minister, since named as finance minister Mahendra Chaudhry, a former prime minister.

Fiji's interim Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama said in a press statement that media freedom is secure and guaranteed...[BUT]...He warned the media that it must recognise there are limitations to constitutional guarantees on freedom of the press.

The Belarusian Supreme Court has ordered the early release of Aleksandr Sdvizhkov, former deputy editor of the now-shuttered independent newspaper Zgoda, who was sentenced in January to three years in a high-security prison for reprinting controversial Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in 2006.

We're relieved at the Belarusian Supreme Court's decision to grant early release to Aleksandr Sdvizhkov, but he should not have been jailed in the first place, CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon said. We remain concerned that the court did not overturn this politically motivated conviction.

Sdvizhkov's lawyer, Maya Aleksandrova, told CPJ that the court cut the sentence to three months after reviewing the journalist's appeal on Friday. The journalist, arrested in November, had already served that length of time. Aleksandrova said the court reduced Sdvizhkov's sentence due to “exceptional circumstances,” citing the journalist's deteriorating health, his good behavior in prison, and his elderly mother's poor health.

Sdvizhkov's paper reprinted the controversial cartoons in Zgoda in February 2006, prompting authorities to begin an investigation into possible incitement to religious hatred. But journalists said the prosecution was motivated less by religious sensitivity than a desire to silence a critical newspaper in the weeks before a presidential election.

Index on Censorship is calling for the release of Tunisian comedian Hédi Ouled Baballah, who has been jailed on the basis of suspect evidence, apparently in punishment for mimicking the country's president.

The trigger seems to have been a private recording of comedian Hédi Ouled Baballah's satirical imitation of Tunisian president Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali that has spread across the country by mobile phone.

Index on Censorship, together with fellow members of the Tunisian Monitoring Group (TMG) of international free speech groups, believes that Ouled Baballah was targeted by police and framed for drugs and currency charges as punishment for the popular satire.

In Tunisia dissidents are never charged for their political acts, but instead are falsely accused of “dishonourable” offences, says OLPEC. Recent victims of this tactic include human rights lawyer Mohamed Abbou, jailed for allegedly attacking a female colleague, and journalist Slim Boukhdhir, accused of breaking public morality laws.

This is the second time that Hédi Ouled Baballah has been persecuted for mimicking Ben Ali. After performing a similar sketch last year he was arrested and beaten up by police in the Bouchoucha detention centre between 9 and 11 March 2007.

Cameroon's government summarily closed a leading private television station on supposed regulatory violations.

The station in Douala was distinguished for its leading coverage of a national debate over a bid by President Paul Biya to scrap a constitutional clause that limits presidential terms.

Two police commanders backed by a squad of riot police forced Equinoxe Télévision off the air and sealed its studios, the station's editor in chief, Albert Yondjeu, told CPJ. Police gave the station a copy of an order from Communications Minister Jean-Pierre Biyiti Bi Essam. The order stated that the station was operating illegally because it had not paid a 100 million CFA francs (US$227,000) broadcast licensing fee, according to Equinoxe Director General Séverin Tchounkeu.

Only three private television stations, Canal2 International, Spectrum TV, and TV+ have operated with official licenses in Cameroon since last year, but the government has allowed the rest of the handful of stations, unable to afford the hefty licensing fees, to operate under a regime of administrative tolerance. [This only applies of course when the station toes the government line].

Local journalists say they believe the move was linked to Equinoxe's pointed coverage of the heated debate splitting supporters and opponents of Biya, who has been in power since 1982.

The Southeast Asian Press Alliance (SEAPA) is concerned that the fate of two newspapers in Malaysia is being left hanging by the authorities following the expiration of their licence, and the debilitating effect this has had on their coverage of news in the run-up to the nationwide elections.

The annually renewable publishing permits for the Tamil-language Makkal Osai and the Mandarin-language Oriental Daily lapsed in December 2007 and have not been approved by outgoing Deputy Internal Security Minister Fu Ah Kiow, reports the Centre for Independent Journalism (CIJ).

The two newspapers, seen to be more critical than the other mainstream media closely tied to the government, have had to show a different slant after Parliament was dissolved for a general election on 8 March 2008.

The Oriental Daily editor has reportedly issued a set of guidelines on election coverage, which includes no frontpage coverage for the opposition.

CIJ, which is monitoring the media's election coverage, observes that Makkal Osai has started to publish news favouring the incumbent government, joining the usual clamour of mainstream newspapers.

We are concerned that the requirement for a publication permit has been effective in silencing critical voices and controlling any attempt for editorial independence. By delaying approval but allowing the paper to continue operating using lapsed permits, the caretaker government is putting the papers at its mercy and sending a signal to their owners to be compliant, CIJ said in its release.

The government of Chad is using the current state of emergency to clamp down on journalists and members of peaceful opposition parties, Amnesty International have said. Amnesty said that the government has arrested at least three opposition members and that some newspapers in Chad have ceased publishing due to potential censorship, with many journalists fleeing the country.

Chadian President Idriss Deby last week declared a state of emergency throughout Chad, citing increased violence between government forces and rebels in the capital city of N'Djamena. The order bans most public meetings, imposes a curfew, authorizes government censorship of the press, and allows regional governments to regulate travel.

The recent fighting in Chad is the most recent eruption of longstanding hostilities between the Chadian government and several rebel groups seeking to depose Deby.

Pervez Kambaksh, the 23-year-old student, whose death sentence for downloading a report on women's rights from the internet has been speaking to The Independent from his Afghan prison.

In a voice soft, somewhat hesitant, he said: The judges had made up their mind about the case without me. The way they talked to me, looked at me, was the way they look at a condemned man. I wanted to say 'this is wrong, please listen to me', but I was given no chance to explain.

For Kambaksh the four-minute hearing has led to four months of incarceration, sharing a 10 by 12 metre cell with 34 others and having the threat of execution constantly hanging over him. His fate appeared sealed when the Afghan senate passed a motion, proposed by Sibghatullkah Mojeddeid, a key ally of the President Hamid Karzai, confirming the death sentence, although this was later withdrawn after domestic and international protests.

Since The Independent exposed the case of Kambaksh, eminent public figures such as the US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice. and Britain's Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, have lobbied Karzai to reprieve him. A petition launched by this newspaper calling for justice for Kambaksh has gathered nearly 90,000 signatures.

Kambaksh's ordeal began in mid- October after the downloading of the document about Islam and women's rights from an Iranian website. He was questioned first by some teachers of religion from the university where he is a student of journalism.

On 27 October he was arrested at the offices of Jahan-e-Naw, a newspaper for which he had carried out reporting assignments. It was about 10 in the morning. They told me that one of the directors of the NDS [the Afghan national intelligence service] wanted to see me. I was taken to a police station and sat around until 3 o'clock when they said they were arresting me over the website entry. When I protested they said they were doing this for my own safety, otherwise I may be killed.

On 6 December he was brought before a court in Mazar where the charges against him, accusing him of blasphemy and breaching other tenets of Islamic law, were read out. But then the proceedings concluded without any evidence being presented before the court.

He arrived at the court at the next session, on 22 January expecting a date to be set for the trial, only to hear numbing news. They normally sit for just a few hours in the afternoon. I was taken into the court just before it shut at 4 o'clock. There were three judges and a prosecutor and some details of the case were repeated. One of the judges then said to me that I have been found guilty and the sentence was death. I tried to argue, but, as I said, they talked to me like a criminal, they just said I would be taken back to the prison.

I was totally shocked. Afterwards I sat and tried to calculate just how long they had taken to judge my case. I thought at first it was three minutes, but then I worked out it was four. That was it, I have been in prison ever since. All I can hope now is that something can be done at the appeal. I would really like the appeal to be heard in Kabul, I think I will get a better hearing there.

Following the international outcry over the case, and the campaign by Mr Kambaksh's supporters, Afghanistan's Supreme Court has said that the appeal may take place at Kabul, away from local justice in Mazar, and that the hearing this time would be in the open. Justice Bahahuddin Baha also stated that the student would have the right to legal representation.

It has been reported that the Uzbek-language website Newsuz.com has been blocked in Uzbekistan.

After a series of critical publications on human rights issues, gas supply issues, and price growth, and also analytical publications on the recent elections, we began receiving letters with threats and demands to follow information posted on government sites. We did not do that and, as a result, out site was blocked, Newsuz.Com editor-in-chief Aziz Nosirov said.

Pervez Kambaksh, the Afghan student sentenced to death for downloading an article about women's rights, has been promised the chance to appeal against his death penalty in an open court, well away from the plotters and extremists accused of hijacking the original proceedings.

Afghanistan's Supreme Court said his appeal would be held in "a very open court" in Kabul, and that he would have every opportunity to select a lawyer.

It was claimed he was originally convicted behind closed doors without proper representation.

Supreme Court Justice Bahauddin Baha said yesterday that the appeal would be heard in Kabul at Kambaksh's request.

More than 87,100 people have signed an Independent petition demanding justice for Kambaksh.

Reporters Without Borders today accused public officials around the world of impotence, cowardice and duplicity in defending freedom of expression.

The spinelessness of some Western countries and major international bodies is harming press freedom, secretary-general Robert Ménard said in the organisation's annual press freedom report: The lack of determination by democratic countries in defending the values they supposedly stand for is alarming.

He charged that the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva had caved in to pressure from countries such as Iran and Uzbekistan and expressed concern at the softness of the European Union towards dictators who did not flinch at the threat of European sanctions.

The report's introduction listed problems expected in the coming year, especially physical attacks on journalists during key elections in Pakistan, Russia, Iran and Zimbabwe.

The worldwide press freedom organisation voiced concern about the safety of journalists covering fighting in Sri Lanka, the Palestinian Territories, Somalia, Niger, Chad and especially Iraq, where it said journalists continue to be buried almost every week.

It also protested against censorship of new media (mobile phones transmitting photos and film and video-sharing and social networking websites) and highlighted media repression in China in the run-up to the Olympic Games there this summer: Nobody apart from the International Olympic Committee seems to believe the government will make a significant human rights concession before the Games start. Every time a journalist or blogger is released, another goes into prison. (...) China's dissidents will probably be having a hard time this summer.

Reporters Without Borders condemns the closure of five Iranian websites and the charges of “violating national security” brought yesterday against Jelveh Javaheri and Nahid Keshavarz, two journalists who write for the women rights's websites WeChange and Zanestan.

These charges are abusive, the press freedom organisation said. Javaheri and Keshavarz just do their job as journalists when they write about the condition of women in Iran. This is Javaheri's second arrest in two months while Keshavarz is constantly being summoned before the Tehran revolutionary court. We call on the authorities to free them at once and to stop bringing prosecutions against them.

Javaheri writes for WeChange. She was previously arrested on 1 December and charged with “disturbing public opinion,” “publishing false information” and “publicity against the Islamic Republic” for writing articles demanding respect for the rights that women are accorded under the Iranian constitution. She was released on bail a month later.

Tehran prosecutor-general Saeed Mortazavi yesterday decided to ban the conservative website Nosazi and four other sites for poisoning the electoral domain. Since 8 February, there has been a growing controversy about the 14 March parliamentary elections, with young mollah Hassan Khomeini, the grandson of the late Supreme Guide, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, condemning the Guardian Council's decision to disqualify 70% of the candidates. Nosazi had criticised his position.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono of Indonesia is asking the country's media to exercise self-censorship because the era of government control over the press is at an end.

In a speech commemorating National Press Day Yudhoyono said self-censorship should be improved by only reporting "appropriate" news.

Bans and (state) censorship of the press no longer exist in our country. The press has achieved the freedom it fought for...BUT...the freedom is not absolute.

He said that the freedom it had gained, the press should be dignified, useful and responsible. It is the press that should control itself for the good of the nation. The people want the press to provide accurate and objective information.

The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf's decision to remove independent broadcaster Aaj TV from air for more than 12 hours.

Satellite transmissions of Aaj were shut down after a prominent critic of the Musharraf government, Nusrat Javed, appeared on a late-night political talk show, according to The Associated Press. Aaj was among more than 40 channels that were taken off air soon after Musharraf declared a state of emergency and suspended the country's constitution on November 3. Though all the channels eventually broadcast again, many did so only after taking anchors and journalists critical of the government off the air and curtailing live coverage of demonstrations and other events that showed opposition to the government.

Aaj was shut down midway through the live talk show Live with Talat, a popular political show, after Javed appeared as a guest, The Associated Press reported. He had also anchored his own popular late night show, “Bolta Pakistan” (Talking Pakistan) before the November 3 clampdown.

Prior to the broadcast, Musharraf's spokesman Rashid Quereshi had advised Aaj that it should not allow Javed to appear on any of its programs.

His name is Tariq Biassi and he's 23 years old. He lives in Banyas with his mother and two sisters. His father was was a previous political prisoner.

Tarek sells and maintains PCs. He is described by his friends as shy and quiet, spending his time surfing the web and blogging.

On 7-7-2007, Tarek was asked by the security branch in Banyas to answer a few questions concerning a comment he left on one of the "sensitive" websites. That was the last his family heard from him.

Human Rights Watch mentioned his name in its report on Syrian officials' continuous arrests of people over online comments:

On June 30, 2007, Military Intelligence in the coastal city of Tartous arrested Tarek Biasi, 22, because he “went online and insulted security services,” according to a person familiar with the case. Biasi remains in incommunicado detention, his whereabouts unknown.

Recently, the new-formed “Ministry of Telecommunications and Technology” issued a new circular asking the owners of the Syrian websites “to exercise accuracy and objectivity (…) and to post the name of the writer of an article and the one who comments on it in a clear and detailed manner.”

Afghanistan's President has promised justice for Sayed Pervez Kambaksh, raising hopes that the condemned student journalist will be freed.

At a joint press conference with the British Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, and the US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, who arrived in Afghanistan on a previously unannounced visit, President Hamid Karzai vowed: Justice will be done. It was the first time that the President has spoken publicly about the 23-year-old's plight, which sparked outrage around the world, after The Independent launched a petition to save him last week. Kambaksh was sentenced to death by an Islamic court for downloading an article about women's rights, which poked fun at Islam by questioning why men are allowed four spouses, but women are not.

Asked about the case by The Independent, Karzai said he had talked it over with the US and British officials, who have both expressed concerns over Kambaksh's fate.

Karzai insisted it was a matter for his country's courts to deal with. He said: This is an issue that our judicial system is handling. I can assure you, that at the end of the day, justice will be done in the right way.

His remarks suggest he is not planning to use his executive powers to intervene at this stage, but that he may yet pardon Kambaksh if the sentence is upheld by Afghanistan's supreme court. Under Afghan law the President has to sign off on a death sentence before it can be carried out.

Conservative clerics and tribal elders have urged the government not to overturn the death penalty. More than 100 religious and tribal leaders attended a rally in Gardez, the capital of Paktia province, in support of the verdict. The province, in eastern Afghanistan, borders Pakistan's tribal belt, which nurtured many of Afghanistan's hardline mullahs.

Khaliq Daad, head of the Islamic council of Paktia, said Kambaksh had "humiliated" Islam. He said: Kambaksh made the Afghan people very upset. It was against the clerics and Islam. He has humiliated Islam. We want the Afghan President to support the court's decision.

If the verdict is upheld Mr Karzai may be forced to choose between the mullahs, who passed the sentence, and the international community, which opposes it.

Zia Bumia, president of the Committee to Protect Afghan Journalists, said the courts had been hijacked by Mr Karzai's enemies to split him between the religious conservatives and his American backers.

Global Voices Advocacy is pleased to announce the second of several planned manuals focused on the topics of circumventing internet filtering, anonymous blogging and effective use of Internet-based tools in campaigns for social and political change.

Blog for a Cause!: The Global Voices Guide of Blog Advocacy explains how activists can use blogs as part of campaigns against injustice around the world. Blogging can help activists in several ways. It is a quick and inexpensive way to create a presence on the Internet, to disseminate information about a cause, and to organize actions to lobby decision-makers.

The goal of Blog for a Cause!: is twofold: to inform and to inspire. The guide is designed to be accessible and practical, giving activists a number of easy-to-follow tips on how to use a blog to further their particular cause.

The guide is divided into five sections:

1. Frequently asked questions about what blog advocacy is
2. The 5 key elements of any successful advocacy blog
3. The 4 steps to creating an advocacy blog
4. How to make your blog a vibrant community of active volunteers
5. Tips to help blog activists stay safe online

In addition to the information provided above, the guide is also full of examples of advocacy blogs from around the world, to inspire readers with a glimpse of what is possible. These featured advocacy blogs have a variety of goals, ranging from freeing a jailed blogger in Saudi Arabia to protecting the environment in Hong Kong and opposing the conflict in Darfur.

The guide was written by Mary Joyce, a student of digital activism based in Boston, and was commissioned by Global Voices Advocacy, an anti-censorship project of Global Voices online.

Reporters Without Borders and the Burma Media Association firmly condemn the arrest of blogger and writer Nay Myo Latt at his home in Rangoon.

This hounding of bloggers is unacceptable, the two organisations said: We do not know where Nay Bone Latt is being held. We urge the authorities to release him and to stop this persecution.

A member of the outlawed National League for Democracy, Nay Myo Latt uses his blog (www.nayphonelatt.net) to record the difficulties encountered by young Burmese when trying to express themselves, especially since last autumn's protests against the military regime that were led by Buddhist monks. He also owns three Internet Cafés in Burma.

The Burmese authorities have stepped up their surveillance of the Internet since the start of January, reportedly pressuring Internet café owners to register the personal details (name, address and so on) of all users and to programme (and save) screen captures every five minutes on each computer. All this data is apparently then sent to the communication ministry.

The only blog platform that until recently had still been accessible within Burma, the Google-owned Blogger (www.blogger.com), has been censured by the regime since 23 January. Bloggers are no longer able to post entries unless they use proxies are other ways to circumvent censorship.

This blockage is one of the ways used by the government to reduce Burmese citizens to silence, Reporters Without Borders and the Burma Media Association said. They can no long post blog entries or disseminate information. Burma is in danger of being cut off from the rest of the world again.

The condemned student journalist Sayed Pervez Kambaksh will not face execution, a senior government official in Afghanistan indicated yesterday.

A ministerial aide, Najib Manalai, insisted: I am not worried for his life. I'm sure Afghanistan's justice system will find the best way to avoid this sentence.

It was the clearest indication yet that the 23-year-old will have his death penalty revoked amid mounting international pressure on the Afghan authorities.

Kambaksh was condemned to die by an Islamic court for insulting Islam. He was found guilty under sharia law after he distributed articles from the internet on women's rights at Balkh university in northern Afghanistan, an act he claims was aimed at provoking debate. His family say he was not allowed a defence lawyer and the trial was in secret.

The verdict, briefly endorsed by the Afghan senate before it retracted its opinion, caused international protests. More than 63,000 people have signed an Independent petition urging the Foreign Office to put all possible pressure on the Afghan government to prevent the execution. The United Nations' senior human rights advocate, Louise Arbour, has written to the President and his top officials. President Hamid Karzai's staff said he had been inundated by appeals from pressure groups across the globe to pardon the student journalist.

The President is concerned about the case and is watching the situation very closely, his spokesman, Humayun Hamidzada, said. But he added: There is a judicial process ongoing.

Manalai is the senior adviser in Afghanistan's Culture Ministry, which is in charge of arbitrating free speech disputes in the media. He condemned the student writer but maintained it was very unlikely he would face the gallows.

The President can pardon death-row prisoners if their sentence is upheld by the Supreme Court. But privately, government sources have hinted that President Karzai would prefer to see the verdict overruled by an appeal court, before it reaches his office.

See full article from IWPR

As columns of people marched through the streets of Kabul holding portraits of journalist Sayed Parwez Kambakhsh, it was strange for me to see his image appear so many times, held by so many hands. Parwez is my brother.

It was just a little over a week since a first-level court in the northern Afghan province of Balkh had passed a sentence of death against Parwez.

The world media had snapped to attention, but for me it was especially important to see my own Afghan countrymen and women staging a demonstration for my brother, and for freedom. The January 31 protest was organised by the Afghanistan Solidarity Party.

Many of the participants told me that although they did not know Parwez personally, they were marching to protect freedom of expression and democracy in Afghanistan.

With shouts of “Long live democracy!” and “We demand Parwez's release!”, the demonstration went on for almost two hours, ending up at the front gate of the United Nations Assistance Mission to Afghanistan.

Police in the southern Russian Republic of Ingushetia detained, beat, and deported journalists and human rights activists who tried to cover an opposition rally in the regional capital.

Authorities mounted a massive crackdown against the roughly 200 protesters in Nazran. Riot police in heavy gear used clubs to disperse the rally; armored personnel carriers and helicopters were deployed, according to CPJ sources. Police rounded up nine journalists and two human rights defenders and detained them at the local police headquarters for several hours, effectively preventing them from reporting on the demonstration. Two of the journalists were badly beaten, according to CPJ interviews.

We are appalled by the abusive actions of the Ingush authorities, which effectively prevented news of civil protests from reaching the rest of the world, CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon said. The forceful prevention of journalists from covering important news is the reason why Russia's North Caucasus has become a virtual black hole for information.

Protesters tried to gather to protest widespread corruption, abductions, killings, and arbitrary arrests in the republic, CPJ sources said.

Before the demonstration began, plainclothes officers rounded up 7 reporters. They were taken to the local police headquarters, allegedly to check their documents. Police held all seven there until the demonstration ended. Ingushetia's Deputy Prosecutor Gelani Merzhuyev told them they were simply being kept away from the unrest for their own safety.

The Committee to Protect Journalists is alarmed by Sri Lankan Defense Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa's brazen public call to censor the media and reintroduce criminal defamation laws.

Rajapaksa, who is the brother of Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa, told the Sunday Lankadeepa that he advocated press censorship, harsh punishments for critical reporting on the military and military expenditures, and a criminal defamation law, according to extracts from the article translated by the Free Media Movement.

If I have the power I will not allow any of these things to be written, the minister said in reference to reporting on the military, according to the Free Media Movement translation.

The newspaper group Wijeya, which publishes the Sunday Lankadeepa and several other widely circulated publications—including the English-language Sunday Times—and the broadcasting conglomerate Maharaja were singled out by the minister as examples of privately owned media groups that abuse their existing freedoms by reporting critically, according to the Free Media Movement translation.

The upper house of parliament in Afghanistan has withdrawn its support for a death sentence issued against a journalist convicted of blasphemy.

Legal experts said that the senate's support for the sentence was unconstitutional.

Its secretary, Aminuddin Muzafari, told journalists its statement had been a "technical mistake". He asked the media to make it clear that the senate did respect the legal rights of Mr Kambakhsh, including the right to a defence lawyer.

But it also said it approved the judiciary's prosecution of cases involving what it called the distribution of anti-Islamic articles.

As the statement of support was withdrawn, about 200 Afghans demonstrated in Kabul against the sentencing of Kambakhsh.

Kambaksh is appealing to higher courts against the death sentence.

His family say his trial was unfair because, among other things, he was not given a defence counsel.

The earlier senate statement supporting the death sentence was signed by its leader, Sibghatullah Mojaddedi, an ally of President Hamid Karzai. The president would have to approve the death sentence for it to be carried out.

Bangladesh's army-backed emergency government has banned two popular live political talk shows, the private satellite television channel ETV has said.

The information ministry handed us a written order saying that we cannot telecast out our live talk shows any more, a senior ETV official said.

The two prime time shows, off the air since Thursday, hosted political and civil society leaders and took questions from viewers and journalists on political, economic, social and cultural issues.

ETV, the country's first terrestrial television station, was banned by a court order during the previous Bangladesh Nationalist Party-led government in 2002. It resumed operation last year after foregoing its terrestrial rights.

Afghanistan's President, Hamid Karzai, has been inundated with appeals to save the life of Sayed Pervez Kambaksh, the student journalist sentenced to death after being accused of downloading an internet report on women's rights.

While international protests mounted over the affair, with the British Government saying it had already raised its concerns, hundreds of people marched through the capital, Kabul, demanding Kambaksh's release.

A petition launched yesterday by The Independent to secure justice for Kambaksh had attracted more than 13,500 signatories by last night, and a number of support groups have been set up on the social networking site Facebook with more than 400 joining one group alone.

Kambaksh was arrested, tried and convicted by a religious court, in what his friends and family say was a secret session without being allowed legal representation.

The United Nations, human rights groups, journalists' organisations and diplomats urged Karzai's government to quash the death sentence and release him. Instead the Afghan senate passed a motion confirming the death sentence. The MP who proposed the ruling condemning Kambaksh was Sibghatullah Mojadedi, a key ally of Karzai.

In London David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, told The Independent that Britain had raised Kambaksh's case as a member of the European Union and with the United Nations, as well as strongly supporting a call by the UN special representative to Afghanistan for a review of the verdict: We are opposed to the death penalty in all cases and believe that freedom of expression is one of the cornerstones of a democratic society.

Nick Clegg, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, said: It is clear that this case has nothing to do with blasphemy and everything to do with prejudice. Afghanistan is sliding back towards the bad old days where women were subjugated and journalists persecuted. We have invested far too much in Afghanistan to allow freedom and democracy to falter. If this sentence is carried through, it will raise major questions about the country's future.

William Hague, the shadow Foreign Secretary, said: We call upon President Karzai and his government to urgently reconsider the decision to sentence Pervez Kambaksh to death. Mr Kambaksh was tried without being allowed any legal representation. Moving towards the rule of law is a vital part of peace-building in Afghanistan. The people of Afghanistan cannot feel secure unless protected by a body of law and a functioning judicial system.

The Liberal Democrat MP Alistair Carmichael, chairman of the all-party group for the abolition of the death penalty, has put down an early day motion urging the British Government to intercede to save Kambaksh's life. In a Commons plea to Harriet Harman, the Leader of the House, he said: I draw the Leader of the House's attention particularly to the front page of The Independent which highlights the case of Sayed Pervez Kambaksh... Surely, given our current involvement in that country... we will not just sit back and allow this monstrous act to take place without doing anything about it?

Ms Harman replied: The Government are determined to stand up for human rights, including freedom of speech, in all countries, and are of course concerned about the matter.

From the Khaleej Times see full article

A group of Afghanistan's Islamic clerics welcomed a court's decision to sentence a reporter accused of blasphemy to death.

We welcome the court's decision, Asadullah Sajid, one of the top leaders of an Islamic council of religious clerics in the eastern province of Nangarhar.

The statement was made after dozens of members of the conservative council met in Jalalabad, the capital town of Nangarhar near the Pakistani border. At least two other such groups have demanded the reporter be executed.

Sajid, who was reading a statement issued by the clerics after their meeting, said, we strongly demand the international community avoid interfering in Afghanistan courts' decisions.

Sign the petition to Save Pervez!

The upper house of the Afghan parliament has supported a death sentence issued against a journalist for blasphemy in northern Afghanistan.

Pervez Kambaksh was convicted last week of downloading and distributing an article insulting Islam. He has denied the charge.

The UN has criticised the sentence and said the journalist did not have legal representation during the case.

The Afghan government has said that the sentence was not final. A government spokesman said recently that the case would be handled "very carefully".

Now the Afghan Senate has issued a statement on the case - it was not voted on but was signed by its leader, Sibghatullah Mojaddedi, an ally of President Hamid Karzai. It said the upper house approved the death sentence conferred on Mr Kambaksh by a city court in Mazar-e-Sharif. It also strongly criticised what it called those institutions and foreign sources which, it said, had tried to pressurise the country's government and judiciary as they pursued people like Kambaksh.

Reporters Without Borders condemns the action of the authorities in blocking access to the independent new website YemenPortal (www.yemenportal.net) since 19 January. Access to at least seven other websites have been blocked since October.

President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s government is having to deal with growing social unrest and a Zaidi uprising but that is no reason to target the media and websites, the press freedom organisation said. As it is unable to influence what they post, the government has decided to block independent news websites in order to suppress their criticisms.

Access to YemenPortal from within Yemen was blocked two days after Prime Minister Ali Mohammed Mujawar and other government officials accused the press on 17 January of jeopardising the country’s national interest and promoting incitement to secession.

The news websites to which the Yemeni authorities have blocked access since October include:

• www.yamenhurr.net
• www.hnto.net
• www.hdrmut.com
• www.al-teef.com
• www.al-yemen.org
• www.adenpress.com
• www.soutalgnoub.com.

Authorities have fired an official in central China after city inspectors beat to death a man who filmed their confrontation with villagers.

The killing has sparked outrage in China, with thousands expressing outrage in Chinese Internet chat rooms, often the only outlet for public criticism of the government.

The incident has also alarmed advocates of press freedom, who say municipal authorities had no right to attack a man for simply filming them.

Police have detained 24 municipal inspectors and are investigating more than 100 in the death of Wei Wenhua, a 41-year-old construction company executive.

The swift action by officials reflects concerns that the incident could spark larger protests against authorities, whose heavy-handed approach often arouses resentment.

On Monday Wei happened on a confrontation in the central Chinese province of Hubei between city inspectors and villagers protesting over the dumping of waste near their homes. A scuffle developed when residents tried to prevent trucks from unloading the rubbish.

When Wei took out his cell phone to record the protest, more than 50 municipal inspectors turned on him, attacking him for five minutes, Xinhua said. Wei was dead on arrival at a Tianmen hospital, the report said.

Qi Zhengjun, chief of the urban administration bureau in the city of Tianmen, lost his job over the incident,.

Chen Yizhong, a columnist on Xinhua's Web site, asked why violence by city inspectors is allowed to continue. Cities need administration, but urban administrators need to be governed by law first, he wrote.

An international press freedom group, Reporters Without Borders, protested the killing: Wei is the first 'citizen journalist' to die in China because of what he was trying to film. He was beaten to death for doing something which is becoming more and more common and which was a way to expose law-enforcement officers who keep on overstepping their limits.

The United Nations has called on Afghanistan to review the case of an Afghan journalist sentenced to death this week for blasphemy, saying it had doubts about whether the trial had been fair.

An Afghan court sentenced Sayed Perwiz Kambakhsh, 23, a reporter with the Jahan-e Now daily paper, to death on Tuesday after he was found guilty of blasphemy.

The pressures for punishment, warnings to journalists, as well as the holding of this case in closed session without Mr Kambakhsh having legal representation point to possible misuse of the judicial process, Bo Asplund, chief UN representative in Afghanistan, said in a statement.

Afghanistan’s constitution commits it to upholding Islamic and universal human rights values, which are clearly compatible. We urge a proper and complete review of this case as it goes through the appeals process.

The Committee to Protect Journalists is concerned that the Burmese government has suspended the weekly Myanmar Times for one week as a result of its publication of unauthorized news, according to international news reports.

Burma’s Press Scrutiny Board ordered the temporary closure because of the newspaper’s January 11 Burmese-language edition, which included an article about the government’s decision to raise satellite fees from 6,000 kyat (US$4.80) to 1 million kyat (US$800). Many Burmese citizens have privately installed satellite dishes in recent years to receive foreign news broadcasts instead of the heavily censored, government-controlled fare.

The newspaper apparently did not receive prior government permission to publish the news item, which was first reported by Agence France-Presse. All news publications in Burma publish as weekly editions because of a time-consuming pre-censorship process which systematically ensures that nearly no news critical of the government is published.

That the government prohibits the media from reporting on its own pronouncements confirms the absurdity of Burma’s censorship regulations, said Joel Simon, CPJ’s executive director.

Myanmar Times Editor-in-Chief Ross Dunkley told CPJ last year that on average 20% of the articles his paper submits to the censorship board every week are rejected and that he must maintain a stock of soft news stories to fill the gaps created on the page.

A court in Afghanistan has sentenced a local journalist to death for blasphemy.

Perwiz Kambakhsh, 23, was arrested on October 27 for allegedly distributing material he downloaded from the Internet and deemed offensive to Islam among fellow students at northern Balkh University.

Based on the crimes Perwiz Kambakhsh committed, the primary court yesterday sentenced him to the most serious punishment which is the death penalty, Balkh province deputy attorney general Hafizullah Khaliqyar told AFP.

The reporter's brother and fellow journalist Sayed Yaqub Ibrahimi told AFP that Khaliqyar had threatened to arrest journalists who 'support' Kambakhsh at a media briefing where officials defended the arrest of the reporter.

Ignoring the threats, journalists were gathering outside Ibrahimi's house to organise a 'possible' protest.

Ibrahimi said the trial was held behind closed doors and without any lawyer defending him.

Global media watchdog Reporters Without Borders appealed to Afghan President Hamid Karzai to intervene. We are deeply shocked by this trial, carried out in haste and without any concern for the law or for free expression, which is protected by the constitution, Reporters Without Borders said: Kambakhsh did not do anything to justify his being detained or being given this sentence. We appeal to President Hamid Karzai to intervene before it is too late.

The group said Kambakhsh was supposedly arrested because of a controversial article commenting on verses in the Koran about women, although it has now been established that he was not the article's author. It seems more likely that the charges were a pretext meant to intimidate and stop his brother from reporting about the plight of women.

Kambakhsh has the right to appeal to higher courts.

Pervez Musharraf has lifted a ban on Pakistan's most popular television station, less than a month before parliamentary elections which could be pivotal in the country's return to democracy.

Geo News and its sister sports channel began broadcasting at 6pm yesterday, just hours after the Pakistani president began his eight-day EU tour in which he is seeking to reassure Pakistan's partners that the democratic transition is still on course, despite the assassination of Benazir Bhutto last month.

Speaking in Brussels, Musharraf referred to what he called the west's "obsession" with democracy and appealed for Pakistan to be given more time to improve its record on human rights and civil liberties.

Musharraf had been under pressure from Europe to lift the ban on Geo News, one of the restrictions left after a six-week state of emergency ended last month.

But the news channel, which had intensively covered his stand-off with the Pakistani judiciary last year, had to agree to a code of conduct, limiting criticism of the head of state, before going back on air.

Geo had also been forced to drop shows by journalists unpopular with the regime, claimed Reporters Without Borders: This constitutes yet further evidence that censorship is unfortunately still the rule just a few weeks before the elections scheduled for February 18.

Over ten thousand people gathered in Istanbul to remember Hrant Dink, who was murdered a year ago. The international press also marked the day, and there were commemorations around the world.

The murder of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in Istanbul a year ago has not been forgotten in Turkey. Indeed, as the trial of the young murder suspects is going on, new evidence pointing to a much more coordinated organisation of the murder emerges nearly weekly.

Thus, the crowd of over ten thousand who gathered in front of the office of Dink’s Agos newspaper in Istanbul on Saturday, at the time and on the spot of his murder a year ago, was not only mourning an outspoken proponent of dialogue between Turkey and Armenia, but also protesting against the lack of investigation of the real forces behind the murder. There were other gatherings and protests in other major cities in Turkey, too. The slogan was For Hrant, for Justice.

The British Times newspaper published an open letter to the editor, in which the Article 19, English PEN and Index on Censorship organisations call on Turkey to reform its Penal Code. The letter predicts that the planned amendments of the controversial Article 301, under which Hrant Dink himself was tried and sentenced, would “prove inadequate.”
 

In Berlin, a vigil was held in front of the Turkish consulate, while the Monument of Innocents in London was the site of another commemorative event. There was another gathering in Cologne, and a photo exhibition of Hrant Dink’s life in Berlin.

These are just a few examples of the many events organised in memory of Hrant Dink; there were more in Germany and Britain, as well as Belgium, the Netherlands and France.

A Hong Kong pirate radio station organized by pro-democracy activists critical of Beijing defied a court injunction and broadcast from a busy shopping area, while a legal battle over the territory's broadcasting laws escalated.

Citizens' Radio broadcast live for about an hour from the Mongkok shopping, airing a panel discussion about a planned march to campaign for democratic reform in Hong Kong, Tsang Kin-shing, one of the founders of the station, said.

Tsang said police officers gave a copy of a court injunction banning the broadcast to guests of the show but did not arrest anyone.

Citizens' Radio is at the center of a drawn-out legal battle over Hong Kong's radio licensing laws, which critics say are too arbitrary and may be used to suppress criticism of the Hong Kong and Chinese governments.

The station, which airs phone-ins and discussions about current events and politics, including the highly sensitive issue of the former British colony's transition to full democracy, had been operating without a license for two years.

Tsang said Citizens' Radio had applied for a radio license but was rejected, and the government did not give reasons why.

Everything is subject to government discretion. The government can grant or deny you a license as long as it wishes. It is not in accordance with the rule of law, Mak Yin-ting, general secretary of the Hong Kong Journalists Association, said.

The government prosecuted Citizens' Radio for broadcasting illegally, but this week a Hong Kong judge dismissed the charges, saying the territory's licensing regulations violated local laws on freedom of expression.

The judge later suspended his ruling after the government said it planned to appeal. The government also separately obtained a court injunction that banned Citizens' Radio from operating in the meantime.

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) considered the cases of journalists from the Evrensel and Gnlk Evrensel newspapers on 8th January.

The court decreed that the punishment of Evrensel for writing about missing persons and the banning of the sale of the Gnlk Evrensel newspaper in the region under emergency law had represented a violation of the freedom of expression.

It has thus sentenced Turkey to paying Fevzi Saygili, Nizamettin Taylan Bilgic and Serpil Kurtay of the Evrensel newspaper 4,000 Euros compensation. Saygili, as owner of the Gnlk Evrensel newspaper is to be awarded an additional 2,500 Euros in compensation.

The court decreed that Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights was violated when the Gnlk Evrensel newspaper was not allowed to be sold in the emergency law region in south-east Anatolia, declared on 23 July 2001.

In addition, the ECHR decreed that the ban did not allow for an appeal to the judiciary, which represented a violation of Article 13 of the Convention. The court did not accept the claim of "discrimination", which the plaintiffs had put forward, citing Article 14 of the Convention.

The ECHR objected against the fines which Turkey sentenced the Evrensel newspaper to paying after it had written about the missing persons. This according to the court, represented a violation of the freedom of expression.

When journalists at China's national broadcaster CCTV log on, one of the first things that pops up on screen is a notice about what not to report.

These notices are often short and seldom say who has authorised them, but they all contain strict instructions about how to report a story.

Journalists were recently warned off a health scandal, told how to report the death of Benazir Bhutto and had to steer clear of a Hollywood film story.

Censorship has been an everyday feature of news reporting in China for as long as the Chinese Communist Party has been in power.

But this wide range of so-called sensitive stories shows that, in China, any story on any subject at any time can still fall foul of the censor's red pen.

On 19 December, journalists received a notice banning them from carrying reports about the death of a pregnant migrant worker. The news had previously been widely reported in the Chinese media.

The saga began when the woman was rushed to a Beijing hospital with what her husband said was a simple cold. But doctors said she was suffering from pneumonia and needed an emergency caesarean. Her husband, believing the hospital wanted to charge him for an expensive and unnecessary operation, refused. Three hours later his wife was dead.

The terse notice banning CCTV journalists from reporting this story did not say why it was sensitive, but health is a hot topic for ordinary Chinese people.

Two days later, the CCTV censors were worried about another story - reports that China had banned some Hollywood films from Chinese cinemas. Censors decided this story could not be reported at all.

The third story that caused problems was the death of Pakistan's former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto two days after Christmas. Journalists could not link Ms Bhutto's death to Pakistan's politics. China and Pakistan are close allies, and the government presumably did not want to cause a friend unnecessary trouble.

These three stories are just the tip of the iceberg, according to David Bandurski, a researcher with the Hong Kong-based China Media Project, which monitors the media in China: There are all kinds of bans and missives against all kinds of stories for different reasons.

Certain subjects are always out of bounds in China, such as speculation about China's national leaders. Other issues, such as health, education and inflation, are closely monitored because they are potentially controversial.

State vensors in the Guinean capital, Conakry, summarily suspended two private newspapers and barred their journalists from practice for three months. Local journalists and news reports say the bans were connected to December articles critical of top government officials.

The state-run National Communications Council accused private weeklies La Vérité and L’Observateur of continually publishing insulting, contemptuous, and defamatory articles of a nature to manipulate public opinion.

CPJ calls on the council to lift these arbitrary suspensions immediately, said CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon. There is a worrying trend in Guinea of punishing newspapers who dare uncover political wrongdoing.

Reporters Without Borders welcomes the release of two women’s rights activists who had been held for more than a month in Tehran’s Evin prison for exercising their right to online free expression.

Maryam Hosseinkhah and Jelveh Javaheri were freed on bail yesterday after the authorities reduced the large amounts of bail being demanded for their release.

The press freedom organisation said. Hosseinkhah and Javaheri were imprisoned for no other reason than the views they expressed. They are innocent and we would like to think their release marks an end to the repression of women’s rights activists. The authorities have been waging an all-out policy to deter people from expressing themselves freely on the Internet. Around 30 cyber-dissidents have been arrested in the past year. We urge the authorities to drop the charges brought against them.

Hosseinkhah is a reporter for the feminist websites Zanestan and WeChange, to which Javaheri is a regular contributor. They are charged with disturbing public opinion, publishing false news and publicity against the Islamic Republic because of articles they wrote demanding respect for women’s rights under the constitution.

They were freed after the amount of bail requested was reduced to 5 million tomans (4,500 euros) from the 95,000 euros which a Tehran revolutionary court had originally demanded for Hosseinkhah and the 50,000 euros demanded for Javaheri.

Websites offering news about Iran have had to register with the culture ministry for the past year. The council of ministers has said that insulting Islam or other monotheistic religions, spreading separatist ideologies, publishing false news or publishing news that invades privacy are all grounds for declaring a website illegal.

Three Ethiopian journalists told CPJ the government denied them applications to launch new newspapers on Tuesday. All the journalists spent 17 months in prison following the country’s 2005 elections. The newspapers were slated to become the country’s first independent political publications since authorities banned eight local papers and forced at least a dozen others to close after the 2005 deadly post-election unrest.

Award-winning publisher Serkalem Fasil, her husband, columnist Eskinder Nega and publisher Sisay Agena fulfilled all legal requirements and submitted applications for Lualawi and Habesha—two current affairs Amharic-language weeklies—since mid-September. By comparison, newly launched current affairs weekly Addis Neger cleared its registration with the ministry within one hour in October, according to owner and editor Mesfin Negash, who was never jailed.

The state of press freedom and free expression declined across Southeast Asia in 2007, according to a yearend report of the Bangkok-based regional media watchdog, Southeast Asian Press Alliance (SEAPA).

A coalition of press freedom advocacy groups from Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand, SEAPA aims to unite independent journalists and press-related organizations in the region into a force for the protection and promotion of press freedom and free expression in Southeast Asia.

SEAPA reported:

From the freest to the most restricted among them, the countries of Southeast Asia in 2007 suffered a weakening of press freedom.

The situation in Burma, already the worst in terms of environments for free expression and human rights, further deteriorated right before the whole world’s eyes. A notorious regime predictable for its censorship and tight controls now plunges into even more uncertain harshness.

Meanwhile, Singapore widened the scope of its uncompromising media laws to include the new media even as citizens are beginning to test the erstwhile freedom found on the Internet.

A similar development transpired in Malaysia, which is showing signs of backing down from a long-standing promise to never censor the Internet and looking for ways to take on bloggers in court, while political protests in the last quarter of the year have put the government on edge.

The freest countries have seen backsliding on the press freedom front. The assassination of yet another Filipino radio broadcaster in the final week of December underscored yet again the continuing impunity by which media and press freedom remained under attack. In the last 12 months the Philippine media have been threatened and charged by government for everything from “sedition” to “obstruction of justice".

In Indonesia, progressive developments in the reform of some antiquated laws in the Criminal Code were cause for celebration, but these, too, were overshadowed by the uneven, unpredictable, and surprising application of laws to the detriment of press freedom. The country’s promising Press Law remained under-utilized, leaving journalists vulnerable under the Criminal Code.

Even a newly ratified Constitution and post-coup democratic elections in Thailand could not mask a slew of hastily passed laws under what is supposedly a temporary and self-limited military junta — some of which could severely undermine human rights and democracy and keep a dark cloud over the press and Thailand’s electronic media in particular.

Indeed, the passage of laws on “national security” and Internet-related crimes in Thailand was a familiar theme in 2007 to all countries in Southeast Asia, from Vietnam to the Philippines and Malaysia to Laos. All highlighted the uncertainties they faced and will continue to face in the coming year.

86 journalists killed in 2007 - up 244% over five years

In 2007:
- 86 journalists and 20 media assistants were killed
- 887 arrested
- 1,511 physically attacked or threatened
- 67 journalists kidnapped
- 528 media outlets censored

Online:
- 37 bloggers were arrested
- 21 physically attacked
- 2,676 websites shut down or suspended

Reporters without Borders said that at least 86 journalists were killed around the world in 2007. The figure has risen steadily since 2002 - from 25 to 86 - and is the highest since 1994.

No country has ever seen more journalists killed than Iraq, with at least 207 media workers dying there since the March 2003 US invasion - more than in the Vietnam War, the fighting in ex-Yugoslavia, the massacres in Algeria or the Rwanda genocide.

The Iraqi and US authorities - themselves guilty of serious violence against journalists - must take firm steps to end these attacks. Iraqi journalists are deliberately targeted by armed groups and are not simply the victims of stray bullets. The Iraqi government cannot immediately stop the violence but it can send a strong signal to the killers by doing all it can to seek them out and punish them.

Somalia and Pakistan saw more journalists killed than they have for several years. Somalia is still very much a country of outlaws where the strongest rule and the media are easy targets. Journalists in Pakistan are caught in the crossfire between the army, Islamist militants and criminal gangs. The only good news of the past year is that for the first time in 15 years no journalists were killed in Colombia because of their work.

The governments of China, Burma and Syria are trying to turn the Internet into an Intranet - a network limited to traffic inside the country between people authorised to participate. At least 2,676 websites were shut down or suspended around the world in 2007, most of them discussion forums.

The fiercest censorship was in China before and during the 17th Communist Party congress when about 2,500 websites, blogs and forums were closed in the space of a few weeks. Syria also blocked access to more than 100 sites and online services at the end of 2007, including the social networking site Facebook, Hotmail and the telephone service Skype, all of them accused by the government of being infiltrated by the Israeli secret police.

During the October 2007 demonstrations by Buddhist monks in Burma, the country’s military rulers tried to block the flow of news being e-mailed out of the country by cutting off Internet access. Censorship ranged from anti-government sites to all means of communication, including film cameras, ordinary cameras and mobile phones.

Kenya Pundit, Ory Okolloh, posts:

As some of you might know I’ve been pretty much the only source of credible information about the election situation in Kenya over the last few months, and more especially since a media blackout was imposed by the government (no live broadcasts, no news, nothing!)

The country is on fire and we have no idea what the government is doing to clamp protests down and how many people have been killed. After the blackout, blogs and SMSs have been pretty much the only source of information for Kenyans both inside and outside Kenya.

Late night I asked my readers to send me whatever information /news they have in
the comment section so that we could keep the news flowing. When I woke up this morning to moderate comments and write a post I was unable to do any admin on Kenyan Pundit

I never thought I would ever witness this in Kenya and be the subject of censorship - in fact every time I spoke about blogging in Kenya I was proud of the fact that the government has stayed away from bloggers. Now I have been shut down (well they think they can shut me down).

Kenya is now officially under a police state and I’m not sure how much coverage this is getting internationally, and I’m not sure how long it will last.

Please spread the word internationally and take up our cause as Kenyan bloggers and citizens.

The Committee to Protect Journalists is alarmed by the ongoing detention of a leading pro-reform Saudi blogger who has been held without charge since early December.

On December 10, Fouad Ahmed al-Farhan, a blogger who runs the site Alfarhan, was detained by Saudi security agents at the Jeddah office of the IT company he owns. Security agents later visited al-Farhan’s home and confiscated his laptop.

In an e-mail sent to friends prior to his arrest, al-Farhan explained that he had received a phone call from the Saudi interior ministry instructing him to prepare himself to be picked up in the coming two weeks for an investigation by a high-ranking official.

The issue that caused all of this is because I wrote about the political prisoners here in Saudi Arabia and they think I’m running an online campaign promoting their issue, al-Farhan wrote in the e-mail, which is currently posted on his blog. He wrote that the agent promised to detain him for only a short period if he agreed to sign a letter of apology. I am not sure if I am ready to do that. Apology for what? he asked in the e-mail, adding that he does not want to be forgotten in jail.

Al-Farhan is one of the few Saudi bloggers who does not use a penname while commenting on political and social life in the country. In one of his last posts before his detention, al-Farhan sharply criticized 10 influential business, religious, and media figures close to the Saudi royal family. His public support of a group of 10 Saudi academics arrested earlier this year allegedly for “financing terrorism” has apparently angered Saudi authorities, he reported on his blog.