2 Dec 2009 | Index Index, Middle East and North Africa, minipost, News
A Tunisian court has given a journalist a three-month prison sentence for broadcasting images of another person without their consent. Zouhair Makhlouf, an online journalist and member of the opposition party was arrested in the run-up to a presidential election in October. The result comes after journalist Ben Brik, a staunch critic of President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali’s government, was handed a six-month prison term for beating up a woman on the street. His lawyers said he was the victim of a police operation to entrap him. Read more here
1 Dec 2009 | Uncategorized
This is a guest post by Sarah Emara
On Saturday the Institute of Contemporary Arts marked 25 years since the Delhi massacres, which killed over 5,000 Sikhs, with the screening of the film Amu.
Cut by the Indian Censor Board to remove details of government involvement, the film focuses on the story of Kaju, a young woman who attempts to uncover the suppressed history around the riots but finds those around her unwilling to discuss it.
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17 Nov 2009 | Uncategorized
OSCE media freedom watchdog Miklos Haraszti welcomes United Kingdom’s decriminalisation of defamation, urges other states to follow
“The United Kingdom is the first among the Western European participating States in the OSCE to officially decriminalize defamation. This is a crucial achievement not only for the country’s own freedom of speech, but a great encouragement to many other nations which are still to pursue such a reform,” Haraszti said.
An amendment to the Coroners and Justice Act decriminalized defamation, sedition and seditious libel, defamatory libel and obscene libel in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
“My Office has recommended the decriminalization of defamation for several years. Although these obsolete provisions have not been used in Western Europe for decades, their ‘chilling effect’ remained. Their existence has served as justification for states unwilling to stop criminalization of journalistic errors, and leave those offences solely to the civil-law domain,” Haraszti said.
“I urge other participating States to speed up reforms and end criminal libel,” he said.”Defamation is a criminal offence in all except nine OSCE participating States — Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cyprus, Estonia, Georgia, Moldova, Romania, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In most countries it is punishable by imprisonment, substantially ‘chilling’ critical speech in the media. Most imprisoned journalists have been convicted for defamation.”
From OSCE
