17 May 12 | Index Index, Middle East and North Africa, minipost
Three journalists have been beaten by police officers in northwest Pakistan. Sher Ali Khan from TV station News One, Siraj Ali of Geo News, and Shabir Ahmed from Pakhtunkhuwa News daily were targeted by police officers while trying to cover a demonstration in the Charsadda district of Khyber-Pakhtunkhuwa province. As police attempted to disperse protesters with batons, the journalists began filming the clash. Police then turned on them, beating them and snatching their cameras in an attempt to destroy their footage. All three of the reporters sustained injuries from the attack, with Khan being admitted to hospital.
17 May 12 | Index Index, minipost, United Kingdom
A number of UK broadcasters have won a judicial review overturning a decision that had forced them to hand over video footage of October’s Dale Farm evictions to Essex Police. ITN, the BBC, Sky, Hardcash Productions and the National Union of Journalists had appealed a decision by Chelmsford Crown Court to grant a production order to present unbroadcasted footage of the controversial evictions to the police. Today Mr Justice Eady and Lord Justice Moses overturned the judgement in a landmark decision, which NUJ general secretary Michelle Stanistreet said was a “huge victory for the cause of press freedom”.
17 May 12 | Middle East and North Africa
Nebil Jridet, General Director of the Arabic-language weekly newspaper Al-Oula has ended his hunger strike.
Jridet spent seven days on hunger strike in protest at Tunisian government’s “unequal” distribution of state advertisements among newspapers. He accuses the government of allocating adverts according to “newspapers’ political affiliations”.
The director’s decision came after talks with Samir Dilou, Minister of Human Rights and Transitional Justice on 15 May. Dilou said: “the state advertisement issue is a just cause and requires all concerned parties’ efforts in order to come up with the solutions which would make the distribution of state ads among newspapers a transparent process”.
In exchange, a national conference addressing state advertisement matters will be held at the end of the month. The National Syndicate for Tunisia Journalists and the National Syndicate for Independent and Party Newspapers will head the conference.
“It will take much time and we are going through serious financial problems which might come in the way of issuing the newspaper in the upcoming weeks” Nebil Jridet told Index.
17 May 12 | Index Index, Middle East and North Africa, minipost
The editor of a Iraqi Kurdish magazine has been arrested for reprinting an allegedly blasphemous article. Hamin Ary, editor of Kurdish and Arabic monthly publication Chirpa (Al-Hamsah in Arabic) was arrested on 7 May after publishing an article by controversial writer Goran Halmat. Ary was arrested for “offences that violate religious sensibilities”, an offence which carries a maximum sentence of three years in prison. The article, entitled “Me and God” was originally posted on Facebook in 2010, and was deemed “offensive to Islam”.
