Case

The Punjab and Haryana High Court has stayed an order requiring journalist Rahul Pandita to pay INR7.5 million (US$89,800) in defamation compensation to senior paramilitary officer Harpreet Singh Sidhu, according to news reports. This stay will remain in effect until the next hearing, scheduled for October 21. On March 5, an appellate court ordered Pandita,…

On June 19, 2024, Frixos Drakontidis was reporting live from the scene of a fire in Varis-Koropiou, a southern suburb of the capital Athens, when an unidentified man approached him and asked him to leave the premises of a company hit by the blaze. When Drakontidis refused, saying that he was a journalist with Protothema…

On June 11, police officers in Kaduna, the capital city of Nigeria’s northern Kaduna State, arrested Gabriel Idibia, a correspondent and freelancer with the privately owned Daily Times and Daybreak Nigeria news sites, while he was taking photos of the officers guiding a large group of cattle across a road, according media reports, Idibia and Daybreak Nigeria publisher Austin Maho, who both spoke to CPJ.  Idibia…

Since June 10, 2024, Syrian journalist Jomaa Akash, a correspondent for the Saudi state-owned broadcasters Al Arabiya and Al Hadath, has received threats of violence on social media, according to statements by the independent Syrian Journalists Association (SYJA) and Syrian Kurdish Journalists Network, and the journalist who spoke to CPJ.  The threats followed Akash’s June…

Police and National Security Intelligence officers detained 32 Rohingyas, a stateless ethnic minority, for around 16 hours in Bangladesh’s southeast Cox’s Bazar region on May 17, 2024, on allegations of holding an unauthorized meeting of the Asia-Pacific Network of Refugees (APNOR), a region-wide network of civil society organizations and advocates. Officers questioned nearly all of…

On May 16, four supporters of Ghana’s ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) assaulted Dokurugu Abubakar Ndeeya, a reporter with the privately owned Zaa Multimedia, while he was filming outside a meeting between Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia and party leaders in the northern Tamale region, the journalist told CPJ and media reports said. Ndeeya told CPJ he…

South African police arrested freelance journalist Sandiso Phaliso while he was photographing a crime scene in the country’s legislative capital of Cape Town on April 25 and held him for about two hours, the journalist told CPJ. Phaliso, who regularly writes for the non-profit news agency GroundUp, said that he went to a crime scene in…

On May 15, 2024, the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s media regulator, the Superior Audiovisual and Communications Council, known by its French acronym CSAC, ordered the privately owned Bosolo TV station to suspend its “Bosolo Na Politik Officielle” program for a month, according to a CSAC video statement posted on X, formerly Twitter, and media reports. According to…

Nicaraguan police detained Orlando Chávez, the director of the independent news radio show “El Metropolitano,” along with his brother and sister, after raiding their home on May 19, 2024, according to the Nicaraguan newspaper La Prensa. News reports said police arrested the journalist’s siblings, Obed and Merary Chávez, for alleged obstruction and confiscated their phones….

Two privately owned newspapers in Lesotho—the Lesotho Tribune and Lesotho Times—faced separate lawsuits in February and March 2024, seeking to shut them down, according to the publications’ owners who spoke to CPJ. In late March, the courts dismissed both lawsuits, but the newspapers still face defamation cases in connection with their corruption coverage. Mergence Investment…