Reporters Sans Frontières

ActiveWatch – Media Monitoring Agency and Reporters without Borders condemn the acts of violence perpetrated against journalists by both policemen and protesters over the past four days. The two organizations also denounce basic human rights violations by the riot police, such as the right to free speech, the right to freedom of movement and the right to freedom of assembly

In an unprecedented move, Reporters Without Borders will shut down its English-language website for 24 hours from 8 a.m. EST on 18 January, in protest against two online piracy bills, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), which are currently working their way through the US Congress.

2011 in figures: 66 journalists killed (16% more than in 2010), 1,044 journalists arrested, 1,959 journalists physically attacked or threatened,
499 media censored, 71 journalists kidnapped, 73 journalists fled their country, 5 netizens killed, 199 bloggers and netizens arrested, 62 bloggers and netizens physically attacked, 68 countries subject to Internet censorship

Reporters Without Borders expresses its deepest sympathy to the family
and colleagues of the journalist Abdisalan Sheikh Hassan, shot dead
yesterday by a man in military uniform in the Hamar Jajab district of
Mogadishu.

Reporters Without Borders roundly condemns the two-year jail sentence that the supreme military court of appeals in Cairo imposed today on Maikel Nabil Sanad, a blogger who has been held since March on a charge of insulting the military in a blog entry.

Reporters Without Borders condemns the violence used by police and soldiers to disperse yesterday’s demonstration by journalists – mostly women – outside the presidential palace in Tegucigalpa to demand justice for the 24 journalists killed since 2003, 17 of them since the June 2009 coup d’état. The latest journalist to be murdered, last week, was a woman.

Reporters Without Borders welcomes the release of Lina Ibrahim, a journalist of pro-government newspaper Tishreen. The news was reported on Facebook by a support group that had called for her release ever since her abduction on 25 October in Damascus suburb of Harasta. It was confirmed by other sources that she had been held by the mukhabarat (intelligence services) in AlKhatib

Reporters Without Borders expresses its grave concern over parliament’s approval yesterday of the first reading of a bill toughening Israel’s libel laws, despite strong objections from Israeli journalists. The bill, provides for a steep rise in the amount of damages payable for articles judged to be defamatory.

“Zuccotti Park is not Tiananmen Square,” said Scott Stringer, the Borough of Manhattan’s Democratic Party president, criticizing the way the New York police manhandled reporters and kept them at a distance as they evicted Occupy Wall Street protesters from their camp in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park in the early hours of yesterday.

Reporters Without Borders unreservedly condemns such acts of violence
accompanied by incitement to hatred and violence, and hopes there will soon
be results from the investigations into these incidents, which do not bode
well for the free circulation of ideas and opinions.

Article by Benoît Hervieu, form the Americas desk