Unless the government has it in mind to ban the Bible, the new law announced by the government this week proposing to outlaw homophobic hate speech will be ineffective. The major source of homophobic hatred in our society is from religious groups....
More than four years after the invasion of Iraq, the full truth of the infamous September 2002 dossier is yet to come out. This was the dossier central to Tony Blair’s case for war, claiming that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction that could be...
Just before my last trip to Chechnya in mid-September my colleagues at Novaya gazeta began receiving threats and were told to pass on the message: I shouldn’t go to Chechnya any more, they said, because if I did my life would be in danger. As...
September is a resonant time in Egyptian politics. It was then, 26 years ago, that an angry Anwar al Sadat - Egypt’s then president - sent over 1,500 journalists, intellectuals and politicians from across the political spectrum to jail without...
As Israelis tuned in to hear about what seemed, for a few terrible days, the opening shots in a long-anticipated war, reporters on the Knesset beat scrambled urgently for information. Ehud Olmert appeared in view, projecting his usual elastic...
An unprecedented coalition of British bloggers has come together over the last two weeks to fight an assault on freedom of speech from Russian oligarch Alisher Usmanov. Lawyers acting for the Uzbek billionaire, who recently bought a large stake in...
The recent developments into investigations of Russian journalists’ murders, the attempts to accuse publicists and writers in extremism and other crimes along with Duma’s legislation activities, prompts the thought that the major task of Russian...
The Burmese junta, responsible for the brutal crackdown on recent protests against the authorities’ decision to hike fuel prices at a time of worsening economic conditions, is bankrolling its regime by exploiting the country’s vast...
The press censorship laws in Burma are draconian to say the least. In its latest move the Burmese military junta has disconnected telephone lines of journalists, leading politicians and activists to curb free the flow of information to the world...
The dramatic wave of demonstrations inside Burma in 1988 (popularly known as the 8888 Uprising) took place amidst a virtual media vacuum. The dearth of real-time historical documentation of events clearly attests to this fact. The stories of those...