The Media High Council (MHC) in Rwanda have called for a three-month suspension to local language tabloid, Umuseso, for allegedly going beyond the boundaries of media rules by allegedly likening the current government to the one that was in power in the run-up to the 1994 genocide. Read more here
Iranian authorities have shut down the Association of Iranian Journalists, when armed men raided and sealed the Tehran offices. Five journalists have been released in the past week including: Massoud Kurdpour, who just completed a one year jail term, Ali-Reza Beheshti, editor-in-chief of Kalameh Sabz and Kambiz Nouroozi, and director of legal affairs at the Association of Iranian Journalists. CPJ has also confirmed the arrest of Fatima Khavari, director of the weekly newspaper Chragh and Omid Selimi, a photographer who worked for Nesf e Jehan newspaper in Esfahan. Read more here
Guo Quan, the founder of the China New Democracy Party will plead not guilty when he stands trial today for subversion against the state according to his lawyer. The trial comes amid reports of numerous detentions and trials of dissidents, alongside an apparent crackdown on activist lawyers possibly to stifle dissent ahead of the 60th anniversary of the Communist state’s founding in October. Read more here
A Russian court in Moscow refused a request from the family of Kremlin critic Anna Politkovskaya to halt a retrial of three men accused of being accomplices in her murder. Lawyers for the family of Politkovskaya, who was gunned down outside her apartment in 2006, had asked for the case to be returned to prosecutors and merged with an investigation into the mastermind behind the murder. The trial will resume in September. Read more here