Sir Tom Stoppard grills Belarusian ambassador over the Lukashenko government’s poor record on free speech (more…)
Police in Somaliland arrested three journalists and six others last Wednesday (2 June), after activists leased a house next to that of the region’s president and used it to display a flag in support of the opposition Kulmiye party. Speaking from prison, one of the journalists, Mohamed Said, claimed that he was arrested after he filmed police beating a group of opposition supporters. The arrests come during the run-up to a presidential election scheduled for 26 June.
On April 14, 47 members of the opposition Musavat (Equality) Party were detained for participating in a demonstration in Baku, in the first political rally ahead of Azerbaijan’s parliamentary elections in November 2010. Demonstrators carried placards calling for freedom of speech, association and assembly, and one called for President Ilham Aliyev to resign. Article 19 has called on the government to ensure that international standards are upheld in the conduct of the elections. “Journalists must also be able to exercise their profession unimpeded and must have the freedom to report on political events”, said Dr Agnès Callamard, Article 19’s executive director.
Prime minister Silvio Belusconi’s party has pushed through rules which will drastically circumscribe political content during the run-up to Italy’s regional elections. State broadcasters must now either accommodate over 30 political parties on their talk shows or be transferred away from their prime-time slots. Belusconi has previously attacked state television, claiming the programme Annozero was a ‘criminal use of public television’ when it interviewed the call-girl Belusconi had allegedly slept with. The European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) criticised Italy’s new rules as the latest ‘nail in the coffin of media freedom‘.