The Supreme Court in Moscow has ordered a new investigation into the murder of Novaya gazeta reporter Anna Politkovskaya. The outspoken critic of Russia’s actions in Chechnya was murdered in October 2006.
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Christopher Graham says his office has been “let down by MPs”. Index on Censorship reports
The new Information Commissioner, Christopher Graham, has called for tough custodial sentences for media breaches of the Data Protection Act.
Speaking at the House of Commons Committee on Culture, Media and Sport, Graham cited the £200 fine handed down to a BNP member who leaked the party’s membership list on the Internet as evidence that breaches of privacy were not taken seriously as criminal offences.
He said MPs had been “seduced by the siren song of Fleet Street” into not pushing for a tougher approach to privacy breaches.
“I want that custodial sentence and I want it now,” he told MPs.
“We need a big stick in the cupboard,” said Graham, who succeeded Richard Thomas as Information Commissioner at the end of June 2009. “What we have now is a promissory note saying we’ll get a big stick if [privacy breaches] happen again.”
A frustated Graham said his office had been “let down by Parliament, let down by the courts, and let down by the newspaper groups” in its mission to protect private information.
Lal Wickrematunge says the 20-year sentence handed to JS Tissainayagam is a warning to Sri Lanka’s already embattled media
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Freelance photographer Marc Vallée is not having the best of times at Climate Camp in Blackheath, London. Following his complaints last week about the conditions placed on media by camp organisers, Vallée, along with fellow freelancer Jonathan Warren, has today claimed to have been assaulted by camp members while trying to photgraph a confrontation between them and members of the Socialist Workers Party. The photographers claim that one individual attempted to take Vallée’s camera, and that Warren, attempting to intervene, was kicked in the stomach.
In an open letter to the Climate Camp, Warren and Vallée said:
We ask the man who assaulted us to come forward and apologise and that the camps organisers unequivocally condemn his actions. We would also ask the Camp’s organisers to seriously consider their responsibility for the negative atmosphere they have created within their movement towards journalists.
The media are not your enemy, but nor should we be your implicit friends either. We are independent and will report all sides of the story truthfully without fear or favour and that should be what you want of us too.