BANGLADESH | FIJI | SINGAPORE | SOUTH KOREA BANGLADESH • Cartoonist Arifur Rahman was freed from Dhaka Central Jail on March 21. He was detained in September 2007, supposedly to prevent him from committing “a prejudicial act” against public order, after the daily Prothom Alo published his cartoon of a boy calling a cat “Muhammad.”…
September 24, 2008 Hugo Restall, Review Publishing, Far Eastern Economic Review LEGAL ACTION A High Court judge in Singapore ruled that the Far Eastern Economic Review had defamed Singapore’s leaders, according to international news reports. Justice Woo Bih Li decided the case in a summary judgment without trial, dismissing arguments submitted by the magazine’s lawyers…
New York, September 19, 2008–A court in Singapore sentenced a blogger to three months in jail on Thursday, one week after the nation’s attorney general sought contempt proceedings against The Wall Street Journal Asia. Both actions come in response to critical analysis of Singapore’s judiciary in connection with a prominent defamation suit.
New York, June 3, 2008—The Committee to Protect Journalists is concerned about the detention of blogger Gopalan Nair on charges of insulting a Singaporean judge during a high-profile libel case. Nair, a former Singapore citizen who obtained U.S. citizenship in 2005, was arrested in a hotel on Saturday evening, according to news reports citing his…
ALGERIA: 2 Djamel Eddine Fahassi, Alger Chaîne III IMPRISONED: May 6, 1995 Fahassi, a reporter for the state-run radio station Alger Chaîne III and a contributor to several Algerian newspapers, including the now-banned weekly of the Islamic Salvation Front, Al-Forqane, was abducted near his home in the al-Harrache suburb of the capital, Algiers, by four…
ALGERIA: 2 Djamel Eddine Fahassi, Alger Chaîne III IMPRISONED: May 6, 1995 Fahassi, a reporter for the state-run radio station Alger Chaîne III and a contributor to several Algerian newspapers, including the now-banned weekly of the Islamic Salvation Front, Al-Forqane, was abducted near his home in the al-Harrache suburb of the capital, Algiers, by four…
New York, October 2, 2006—The Committee to Protect Journalists today condemned a ban on the Far Eastern Economic Review, which has been hit with a criminal defamation lawsuit by the Singapore leadership for an article about an opposition politician. The Ministry of Information, Communications and Arts revoked the Review’s distribution rights in Singapore on September…