2007 IWMF Courage Awardee’s Publishing Company Convicted

 

The IWMF is concerned for 2007 Courage in Journalism Award Winner Serkalem Fasil. Her publishing company was convicted June 11 by the Ethiopian High Court – along with two other publishers and four editors – on anti-state charges linked to coverage of the government’s handling of disputed parliamentary elections in 2005.

Fasil, a publisher who owned three newspapers at the time of her arrest in November 2005, could face heavy fines or have her company dissolved, according to CPJ. Fasil was acquitted in April.

Dawit Fasil, brother of Serkalem and deputy editor of one of the company’s newspapers, had also been released in April, but he has now been returned to prison. He faces up to three years of imprisonment on charges of “inciting the public through false rumors.”

• Read the CPJ alert.
• See the press release about this year’s IWMF Courage in Journalism Award winners.

Journalist Threatened, her Car Sabotaged in Mexico

Mexican journalist Lydia Cacho’s car was sabotaged May 8. Cacho was also threatened earlier this month when she testified at the trial of a pedophile.
Read (in Spanish) about the incident on Cacho’s website.

Al-Jazeera Producer Receives Prison Sentence

Howayda Taha Matwali, a producer for Al-Jazeera, was convicted May 1 on charges of harming Egypt’s national interest and falsely depicting events for her work on a documentary exposing police abuse. She was fined and sentenced to six months in prison. Matwali, of Qatar, also works as a reporter for the London-based daily Al-Quds al-Arabi.

Uzbek Journalist Sentenced to Prison

Umida Niyazova, an independent journalist in Uzbekistan and a human rights advocate, was sentenced May 1 to seven years in prison. At a trial that was closed to the press, Niyazova was found guilty of charges of smuggling subversive literature and distributing foreign aid material that threatens national security. Niyazova, who has already spent more than three months in jail, will have 10 days to appeal the charges.
Read the CPJ alert.

Threats Grow Against Female Bloggers

As their presence in the blogosphere increases, female bloggers are facing increased threats. Women are targets of sexual harassment and other threats, which are often of a more explicit and malicious nature than those against men.
Read the article in The Washington Post.

Politkovskaya Remembered in Light of International Women’s Day

In honor of International Women’s Day, Maria Cristina Caballero, former director of investigations at Semana, a weekly news magazine in Colombia, wrote about former IWMF Courage in Journalism Award Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian journalist who was killed in October 2006.
Click here to read the article on PostGlobal.