New York, August 1, 2007— The managing editor of a Tunisian online magazine is due to appear in court in Tunis on August 2 on charges of defamation that could lead to his imprisonment for up to three-and-a-half years, according to one of his lawyers. The charges against Tunisian rights activist Omar Mestiri stem from…
New York, July 31, 2007–The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns the attack by a group of armed men on a fledgling independent Yemeni newspaper in the capital, Sana’a, on Monday. In a possibly related situation, the Yemeni Ministry of Defense has brought a case against the paper accusing it of harming national security, a charge…
New York, July 25, 2007—The Committee to Protect Journalists welcomes the release from prison on Tuesday of a Tunisian human rights lawyer who had been jailed nearly 28 months because of online articles he wrote criticizing the Tunisian government. Mohammed Abbou and more than 20 other political prisoners were freed by order of President Zine…
New York, July 24, 2007—Two Moroccan journalists detained for more than a week were charged today with possessing classified documents after they recently published secret government papers regarding terrorist threats against Morocco. The Casablanca public prosecutor charged Abderrahim Ariri, publisher of the Moroccan weekly Al-Watan Al An and Mustafa Hormatallah, a journalist for the paper,…
New York, July 18, 2007—The Committee to Protect Journalists is deeply troubled by the detention of two Moroccan journalists who are being held for publishing secret government documents. Abderrahim Ariri, publisher of the Moroccan weekly Al-Watan Al An, and Mostafa Hormatallah, a journalist for the paper, were summoned for questioning by police in Casablanca yesterday…
Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists is writing to express alarm about the treatment of an award-winning Palestinian journalist who said he was abused by Israeli Shin Bet agents at the Allenby Bridge border crossing between Israel and Jordan late last month.
New York, July 6, 2007—The Committee to Protect Journalists is outraged by Thursday’s shooting of a Palestinian cameraman by Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip. Imad Ghanem, a cameraman for the Hamas-affiliated satellite channel Al-Aqsa, was filming paramedics transferring victims of an Israeli tank shell in the eastern part of Bureij refugee camp in central…
New York, July 5, 2007–The Committee to Protect Journalists is deeply troubled by vague terrorism charges brought on Wednesday against the editor of an opposition news Web site. A state security court charged Abdel Karim al-Khaiwani, former editor of the online newspaper Al-Shoura, which is affiliated with the Popular Forces Union Party, with conspiring with…
Ahmed Reda Benchemsi, the 33-year-old publisher of the independent Moroccan weekly TelQuel, sensed someone was trying to send him a message. In a matter of months, two judges had ordered him to pay extraordinarily high damages in a pair of otherwise unremarkable defamation lawsuits.