The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) reports Gwinnett County schools in Georgia employ a filter, Blue Coat, that blocks access to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender site and classifies them as sexually explicit or pornographic. The ACLU...
Jordanian journalist, Alaa Fazza, was released from prison Wednesday, on the orders of King Abdullah II yesterday (1 June), the country’s independence day. Fazza was been detained 14 days by a military court on charges that he had accused the...
Russian authorities arrested Rustam Makhmudov in Chechyna on Tuesday (31 May). He is suspected of shooting Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya to death in 2006. Politkovskaya was one of the fiercest critics of now Chechyan President Ramzan...
Surveillance and spamming — how the Syria’s embattled regime and its supporters battle protesters on social media. Jillian C York reports
The deaths of two ethnic Mongolians, allegedly killed by Han Chinese, in China’s Inner Mongolia region in May, has sparked the worst riots this region has seen in decades. Many areas, including the regional capital, Hohhot, are under martial law....
The Singapore High Court has denied writer Alan Shadrake’s appeal against his six-week jail sentence. Shadrake was convicted of "scandalising the judiciary" in November after he published "Once A Jolly Hangman" a book criticising the use of the...
Azerbaijan journalist Eynulla Fatullayev has been pardoned by the country’s president Ilham Aliyev, according to a report on the News.az website.
Fatullayev’s name featured on a list of prisoners to be released on the morning of Friday 27 May.
Fatullayev, who worked as a reporter on Elmar Huseynov’s magazine Monitor and later founded and edited Realny Azerbaijan and Gundelik Azerbaycan, served almost four years in prison.
Index on Censorship, English PEN, Article 19 and Amnesty led an international campaign for the 34-year-old editor’s release.
Natasha Schmidt, Assistant Editor of Index on Censorship said:
“We’re absolutely delighted that Eynulla will be freed. This comes more than a year after the European Court of Human Rights ruled that he should be released. Only last month Index lobbied European leaders to ensure that this judgement was enforced and that freedom of expression is upheld. It is of concern however that bloggers and Facebook activists are still in prison.”
A federal lawsuit filed last Thursday against Cisco Systems claims the computer networking company helped design the controversial “Golden Shield” firewall used by the Chinese government to censor the internet and monitor dissidents, such as...
US view: The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Jillian York and Cindy Cohn examine the Ryan Giggs affair
Journalist Song Zhibiao has been suspended by the Southern Metropolis Daily for writing an editorial remembering the Sichuan earthquake, referring also to the dissident artist Ai Weiwei. The Chinese editorial not only referred to Ai Weiwei’s...
Iran's state-run English language channel Press TV could face a hefty fine from UK TV regulators after it broadcast a prison interview with jailed journalist Maziar Bahari. Ofcom found that the station had breached Bahari's rights by broadcasting...
Breathless narratives do not take full account of African realities, says Nick Young