India

As Internet penetration deepens, largely religiously and socially conservative India is struggling to cope with concerns about controversial web content and its easy accessibility to a vast population, all with little oversight. Local courts have become the launching point for some of the anti-Web offensives.

New York, December 22, 2011--An Indian court has ordered 22 Internet sites to remove content it said promoted hatred and communal disharmony, according to news reports. 

Amid a raging debate on Internet freedom and censorship in India, members of the government met last week with a clutch of website operators, including representatives of Yahoo, Google, Facebook and Microsoft. In a meeting scheduled to address a wider plan to leverage social media to empower the government, it's unclear whether the touchy subject of filtering content was addressed, and the government said the meeting's tone was conciliatory. In any case, there has as yet been no resolution of the question of who should be responsible for filtering content deemed offensive, or how such a determination should be made

Retired Supreme Court Justice Markandey Katju is shaking things up at the Press Council of India, where he was appointed chairman in October. The statutory body, mandated to look at media freedom and address complaints against the print media since 1966, has often been criticized for ineffectiveness, its role limited to admonishing news outlets.

Stark regional differences are seen as jailings grow significantly in the Middle East and North Africa. Dozens of journalists are held without charge, many in secret prisons. A CPJ special report

New York, November 29, 2011--The Committee to Protect Journalists calls for an investigation into the November 25 attack on four journalists reporting on a protest in Indian-controlled Kashmir.

New York, September 21, 2011--An Indian journalist who covered police violence in the state of Chhattisgarh was recently arrested on antistate charges that human rights groups say are retaliatory, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.

Two photojournalists said they were beaten by police and detained for several hours while they were covering a protest that escalated into a violent clash between youth and government forces in Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, on August 19, 2011, international news reports said.

New York, June 27, 2011--The Committee to Protect Journalists welcomes news today that police in Mumbai have arrested seven suspects in the June 11 slaying of veteran crime reporter Jyotirmoy Dey. But CPJ is concerned that the alleged mastermind remains at large and that police have not identified a motive in the killing.

In the comfort of my London home, far from the dangers of crime reporting in Mumbai, the news flash on television seemed unreal. Senior journalist Jyotirmoy Dey had been killed, pumped full of five bullets in broad daylight. I thought things like this only happened in Bollywood flicks, and that crime reporters in Mumbai never had any reason to jump at shadows. Alas, I was wrong.