International Press Institute (IPI)

The Twitter shutdown came six weeks after the Turkish Parliament passed a series of amendments to existing Internet legislation, known as Law 5651, that impose alarming restrictions on digital liberties and freedom of expression.

A Costa Rican court has ruled that government surveillance of a reporter’s phone records was unconstitutional. The ruling was made in the case of Diario Extra journalist, Manuel Estrada, who was targeted by the Judicial Investigation Police after he wrote an article that criticised the agency.

Three years after Burma embarked on a path toward democracy and away from its history of military rule, assessments of its success vary, especially around media freedom and free expression.

Grenada’s official Government Information Service reported that the House of Representatives voted to amend the Electronic Crimes Act 2013 by withdrawing three sections that various groups had criticised for their potentially harmful effects on press freedom and freedom of expression.

Aung San Suu Kyi, an icon of the struggle for democracy in Burma, recently spoke to a room full of journalists who came to Yangon to attend the East-West Center conference “Challenges of a Free Press”.

On 23 February, an unknown man dumped a bucket of faeces over writer and columnist Ante Tomic’s head. In a separate case, carnival participants in Omis burned an effigy symbolising Vinko Vukovic, a journalist who has reported on corruption in the town.

Vivian-Anne Gittens, publisher of the Nation newspaper, as well as Editor-in-Chief Roy Morris and senior journalist Sanka Price, face up to five years in prison in connection with the newspaper’s publication of a photograph that appeared to show two minors engaging in a sexual act in a classroom at a rural Barbados school.

After a series of increasingly violent events, IFEX members and supporters call on Chief Executive Leung Chun-Ying to take clear and deliberate steps to defend press freedom.