24 Aug 2010 | Index Index, minipost
Police in eastern Ukraine have reclassified the case of a missing journalist as “premeditated murder“. Vasyl Klymentyev, chief editor and reporter for newspaper Novyi Stil, was last seen on 11 August getting into a BMW with an unknown man. The Kharkiv-based weekly newspaper is well known for reporting on corruption in local government and law enforcement. Klymentyev’s most recent articles criticised a local prosecutor and head of the regional fiscal police, and the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has urged investigators to focus on his journalism as a motive. Klymentyev’s deputy said that the editor had been threatened several times before and had been offered bribes to keep damaging information quiet.
27 Jul 2010 | Index Index, Middle East and North Africa, minipost, News and features
Emadden Baghi, an Iranian human rights activist and journalist, has been given a year-long prison sentence and banned from any political activity for five years. He was arrested during anti-government protests in 2009. He faces a second trial relating to accusations surrounding an interview he conducted with cleric Hossein Ali Montazeri for BBC Persia. Baghi is a previous winner of the French Republic’s Human Rights Prize and the Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders.
27 Jul 2010 | Index Index, minipost
A journalist narrowly escaped death in an incident in Veracruz, Mexico. Edgar López took photographs of a local mayor admonishing a police officer arrested for being drunk on duty. The mayor was angered by the presence of journalists and seized a camera from Enrique García. Later, when López left the station he was followed and stopped by eight officers. He was beaten and one of the officers fired a shot, which missed. The officers then fled the scene.
23 Jul 2010 | Index Index, minipost
Burundi journalist Jean Claude Kavumbagu was arrested and charged with treason on 17 July. Kavumbagu, the editor of online news service Net Press, published an article that accused Burundi’s security forces of stealing and looting. It also suggested that they would be unable to prevent a terrorist attack on their country. It remains unclear why he was charged with the war-time offence of treason and not under the Burundi’s press law. On Saturday night, 15 radio stations in the capital Bujumbura broadcast simultaneous messages calling for Kavumbagu’s release. The punishment for treason in Burundi is life imprisonment.
