The Afghan Senate has issued a statement supporting the death sentence imposed on a journalist. Pervez Kambaksh, 23, was convicted last week of downloading and distributing an article critical of Islam. His trial has been criticised by the UN and...
CATEGORY: News and features
Reporters sentenced to hard labour
A court in Baku, Azerbijan, has sentenced two journalists to hard labour following their conviction for libel. The charges related to articles they published in 2007 regarding alleged corruption in government circles. Avaz Zeynalli, the editor of...

Afghanistan: reporter beaten
The situation for journalists in the north of the country is deteriorating, writes Harun Najafizada Police in the northern Afghan province of Kunduz beat up a local journalist last week, apparently because he wrote a story critical of Afghan...
Websites blocked in Yemen
On 19 January, three domestic news and opinion websites were blocked to users in Yemen by the government-owned Internet provider. The sites joined a list of at least five others that have been censored without any official explanation. News site...
Turkey: threats to free press
In recent weeks there have been many arrests and convictions in Turkey citing the archaic Penal Code which is used to curtail freedom of expression. Here are some of the more alarming cases Professor Attila Yayla was convicted on 28 January of...

Grooming for jihad
New proposals to limit extremist speech could have a significant chilling effect on the Internet, argues Bill Thompson Taking a leaf from its approach to prosecuting predatory paedophiles who use the Internet to establish contact with young people,...
Iraq: journalist detained
Rashid Majid Al-Sari, editor of biweekly newspaper Al Fatah, was arrested and his computer and personal files confiscated by US troops at his Baghdad home on 18 January. Al Fatah is affiliated to Sayyid Al Shuhada, a Shia party founded in 1991. It...
Somalia: photographer jailed
Awale Jama Salad , a photo-journalist for Garowe Online, has been sentenced to six months in jail. He was arrested on 23 December in Somalia’s northern region of Puntland, in connection with photographs he took of the kidnapped French TV journalist...
Brazilian church sues reporter
At least 28 lawsuits have been filed against the journalist Elvira Lobato and the newspaper Folha de S Paulo after the publication of an article critical on the evangelical Christian organisation the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG)....
New guidelines for combating campus extremism
In a move designed to tackle the threat of extremism on university campuses, the UK government issued updated anti-terrorism guidelines for academics on 22 January. The recommendations state that universities should have a clearly defined freedom...