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.
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 National Police activities.
Hameed Mashhoon, the editor of independent weekly newspaper Sada-e Watan (the Voice of Homeland) was beaten up in downtown Kunduz while he was buying medicine at a pharmacy.
Mr Mashhoon told reporters that right after he left the pharmacy, a police officer attacked him, hitting him with the stock of his Kalashnikov.
A young reporter has been found guilty of blasphemy, writes Harun Najafizada in Balkh
A primary court in the city of Mazar-e Sharif in northern Afghanistan has sentenced local journalist Sayed Parvez Kambakhsh to death.
Kambakhsh, 23, a reporter for Jahan-e Naw (New World) weekly and a student of journalism at Balkh University has been accused of blasphemy and misrepresenting the verses of the Quran.
On Tuesday afternoon, the primary court of Mazar-e Sharif convened a session behind closed doors and announced the verdict after a three-hour discussion.
The session, which was not attended by defending lawyers, journalists or human rights defenders, or even by Kambakhsh’s relatives, has been widely criticised for issuing such a strong sentence and ignoring the Afghan constitution.
Kambakhsh, who was arrested three months ago by the National Security Department (the intelligence service) and kept in prison, had downloaded an article from an Iranian website and distributed it to his friends.
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