A journalist appeared in Kampala Magistrates Court yesterday charged with criminal libel. Timothy Kalyegira, the editor of Uganda Record, a website which has been critical of the country’s governing National Resistance Movement. Kalyegira was...
According to Pakistani news sources, the body of the Pakistan bureau chief for Asia Times Online, has been found. He had been missing since Sunday. Previous reports said that he was under the custody of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence. Human...
Protesters took to the streets on Monday (30 May) in Inner Mongolia after Han Chinese coal truck drivers killed a Mongolian herder who attempted to stop them from trespassing on grasslands. Chinese officials have sought to stifle the protests in...
Hunan Broadcasting System, one of China’s largest television networks, has told the Financial Times it will reduce entertainment content and revamp its programming to comply with new government broadcasting standards. The network has outposts in...
Just hours after the PROTECT IP Act passed unanimously in the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday, Democratic Senator Ron Wyden from Oregon placed a hold to prevent it from reaching the Senate. Wyden argued the legislation was an “overreaching...
The European Commission’s plan to tackle internet copyright infringements, such as illegal media downloads, would require internet service providers to work with the entertainment industry to monitor content. Critics fear this could lead to...
Three gunmen killed Channel 24 television owner Luis Ernesto Mendoza Cerrato last week. Gunmen also wounded newspaper manager Manuel Acosta Medina two days as he drove home. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 11 journalists have...
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...
The Indian government forced The Economist to use a sticker to conceal a map of Kashmir in the magazine. The magazine's cover story, which utilised the map, was on the region’s border disputes. Nearly 30,000 censored issues were distributed in...
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.”