When Axier López, the 37-year-old reporter for the Basque-language magazine Argia, opened the mailbox at his home in Barakaldo early April, he discovered he’d become the first journalist in Spain to be punished under the Public Security Law.
He was ordered to pay €601 (£466) for photos of an arrest he published on Twitter without state permission on 7 March.
Protest for Khadija Ismayilova, Azerbaijan embassy, London. Credit: Cat Lucas, English Pen
Azerbaijani investigative journalist Khadija Ismayilova may have been released from prison on Wednesday, but two trumped-up charges against her — illegal entrepreneurship and tax evasion –remain. Her seven-and-a-half-year jail sentence has only been reduced to a three-and-a-half-year suspended term and she isn’t free to leave the country.
Today is Ismayilova’s 40th birthday and to mark the occasion, protesters gathered at 40 different demonstrations from around the world, not just to celebrate, but to call for all charges against her to be quashed. Index joined other members of the Sports for Rights coalition at the Azerbaijani embassy in London (see above). Read More
Khadija Ismayilova
Azerbaijan’s Supreme Court has ordered the release of investigative journalist Khadija Ismayilova after an international campaign to free her and just two days before international protests against her detention were due to take place.
Khadija, who turns 40 on Friday, had previously been sentenced to seven-and-a-half years in prison on trumped-up financial charges in September 2015, having been detained since December 2014. The supreme court has just announced that her sentence has been reduced to a suspended three-year sentence. She will be subject to a travel ban and other restrictions.
“We are delighted that Khadija Ismayilova has been released from prison,” said Index’s senior advocacy officer Melody Patry. “She shouldn’t have spent a day in jail. The charges against her were spurious and we call for her full acquittal. We also reiterate our calls for Azerbaijan to release all political prisoners.” Read More
Mapping Media Freedom launched to the public on 24 May 2014 to monitor media censorship and press freedom violations throughout Europe. Two years on, the platform has verified over 1,800 media violations.
“The data the platform has collected over the last two years confirms that the state of press freedom across Europe is deplorable,” said Hannah Machlin, project officer for Mapping Media Freedom. “Media violations are occurring regularly in countries with strong democratic institutions and protective laws for journalists. Legislation limiting the press, violence across the continent and authoritarian governments are also fuelling this rapid and worrying decline. We hope that institutions and leaders take note of this information and take action swiftly.”
In early April 2016, major Hungarian news website vs.hu began publishing less than normal. On 25 April a dozen journalists, including editor-in-chief Olivér Lebhardt, resigned. While the newsroom is still functioning, its future is yet to be decided by its owners, according to daily newspaper Népszabadság.
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Each week, Index on Censorship’s Mapping Media Freedom project verifies threats, violations and limitations faced by the media throughout the European Union and neighbouring countries. Here are five recent reports that give us cause for concern.
Mapping Media Freedom documents press and media freedom violations across Europe. The documented incidents are publicly accessible and can be explored, filtered and searched through the interactive Alert Explorer. Quantitative and qualitative analysis providing deeper insights and statistics about the press freedom situation in Europe is published within regular monitoring reports and fact sheets.
This project is run by the Media Freedom Rapid Response (MFRR), a Europe-wide mechanism, which tracks, monitors, and reacts to violations of press and media freedom in EU Member States and candidate countries. This project provides legal support, public advocacy, and information to protect journalists and media workers.
All content available on the Mapping Medea Freedom website is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
