International Press Institute (IPI)

A car marked with the name of the the Montenegrin daily Vijesti was set ablaze on a street in the Podgorica on 13 February 2014, the latest of several attacks against Vijesti‘s journalists and property over the past eight years. In three separate incidents in 2011, four company cars were set on fire by unidentified assailants.

Authorities in The Gambia have pressed charges against two journalists over an article written in December 2013. The report describes a meeting where 19 members of the “Green Youths”, a group loyal to the ruling Alliance of Patriotic Re-Orientation and Construction, announced that they planned to join the United Democratic Party.

An Austrian man who argued in an op-ed that some human smugglers perform a public service could spend up to two years in prison in a case that has chilling implications for free expression.

195 civil society organisations from around the world have called on the UN to put government accountability and independent media at the centre of a new framework for global development.

Egyptian television cameraman Mohammed Badr acquitted more than six months after he was detained by security forces for allegedly carrying a weapon.

The International Press Institute and its affiliate, the South East Europe Media Organisation welcome news that Ukraine’s Parliament voted to repeal sweeping anti-protest legislation that had incited violent clashes between protestors and police.

Sinan Alic said that an unknown man attacked him at approximately 11 a.m. last Saturday near his weekend home in Trakilovici, close to the town of Tuzla. Alic, who at one time was active in reporting on war crimes in Bosnia and Herzegovina, said that he received threats by SMS in recent months.

The Libel and Defamation (Amendment) Bill, 2013 would amend existing criminal law to abolish the offence of malicious defamatory libel, while preserving the offence of defamatory libel known to be false.