Africa

In a ruling issued on January 9, 2009, the state-run media regulator, the High Communication Council, suspended from circulation the private daily Le Citoyen for one month for allegedly violating journalism ethics, according to news reports and local journalists.  

An appeals court in the Senegalese capital of Dakar upheld a three-year prison sentence against imprisoned editor El Malick Seck on February 23, 2009, according to international and local news reports. The case involved an editorial implicating President Abdoulaye Wade and his son Karim in an alleged money-laundering scandal.

A week ago today, CPJ sent a letter of concern to President Blaise Compaoré of Burkina Faso urging his government to investigate a series of death threats sent in the past year or so via e-mail to independent journalists there. Using Yahoo France accounts, senders have boasted about intimidating the press in impunity by referencing the still-unsolved 1998 murder of investigative journalist Norbert Zongo. 

This week in the mountain Kingdom of Swaziland, the state-owned daily Swazi Observer reported that an official has apologized for summarily dismissing a female reporter from Parliament nearly two weeks ago. It was the latest in a controversy sparked by allegations of gender discrimination against Mantoe Phakathi, an award-winning journalist with the private monthly The Nation.

We received good news this morning from The Hague, where the presiding judge in the war crimes trial of Charles Taylor dismissed a request to compel Liberian journalist Hassan Bility to reveal the identity of a confidential source. 

Filmmaker Robyn Kriel, 25, from Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, spoke to PBS' Wide Angle last week about the risks she took reporting from Zimbabwe in the lead-up to the country's 2008 presidential election. Last April, CPJ closely followed the case of Kriel's mother, Margaret Kriel, who was imprisoned for four days on accusations of "practicing journalism without accreditation." You can listen to the interview here.