The United Nations Human Rights Council today passed a resolution aimed at restricting criticism of religion, or 'religious defamation'. Roy W Brown examines why the UN is putting protection of ideas above freedom of expression Slowly but...
Google said that its YouTube video-sharing website had been blocked in China. Google said it did not know why the site had been blocked, but a report by the official news agency Xinhua said that supporters of the Dalai Lama had fabricated a video...
The UK government has said that communications over social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace could be monitored in an effort to tackle crime and terrorism. Read more here
Sir Ken Macdonald QC, Former Director of Public Prosecutions, has joined the board of Index on Censorship. Sir Ken, a co-founder of leading human rights chambers Matrix, was Director of Public Prosecutions from 2003 to 2008. He was knighted in...
A parliamentary report published by the Joint Committee on Human Rights has warned that counter-terrorism laws are being abused by police in their dealing with protests. Legislation including the Terrorism Act has allowed a heavy-handed approach to...
Writer and journalist Abou Abbass Ould Brahim, the editor of the news website Taqadoumy, was released today after being held for three days in the Mauritanian capital. The website was allowed to reopen 24 hours after the Nouakchott prosecutor's...
Australia has blacklisted a webpage from the whistle-blowing site Wikileaks containing an index of URLs censored by Danish authorities. The Australian Communications and Media Authority added two Wikileaks pages to its censorship list: one for the...
The ‘religion’ section in Egyptian national identity cards may now be left blank, after a court ruling on 16 March. Computerised ID cards were introduced in 1995, and forced people to identify themselves with one of the three main religions: Islam,...
Journalist Abdulkarim Al Khaiwani has been pardoned again by President Ali Abdullah Saleh. Al Khaiwani had already been pardoned last September after being sentenced to six months in prison on a charge of ‘collaboration with the rebellion in the...
A senior editor of the Wall Street Journal is being taken to court by the Singapore government. On Friday 13 March a High Court judge granted an application by the Attorney-General to start proceedings against Melanie Kirkpatrick for “actions which...