Pakistani authorities want to access people’s data stocked online, shut down websites anytime they wish or put people behind bars for trivial activities such as scanning for a wifi network. But a string of valiant activist groups are putting up a good fight. Blackberry made global headlines in November when it announced that it was…
The Law and Justice (PiS) party, who won last year’s elections in Poland, rushed to adopt legislation in the last days of 2015 allowing them to fully control the public media management. Criticism abounds, but the government doesn’t care. “You were talking about introducing BBC standards in Polish public media, but in reality you made…
Since its inauguration June 2015, the Senate, the upper legislative chamber of Nigeria’s National Assembly, has been wading through a series of controversies ranging from bogus salaries and allowances, corruption allegations, underperformance, to most recently an anti-people legislative proposal initiated by senator Bala Ibn Na’Allah who has a rather evasive background. Organizations and individuals including…
A new law on the right of reply was adopted last month in Mexico after it had hibernated for eight years in the Congress. But hopes that this act would empower citizens were shattered as the “reply process” put forward by this law is likely to be lengthy, legally convoluted and fully under the control…
Jordan’s state television JRTV has seen its audience levels plummeting in the past decade. Its reform has never succeeded. Now, the government pledges to launch a new TV channel that would truly serve the public. But these plans are raising numerous eyebrows. The government of Jordan has reportedly decided to allocate nearly US$15 million a…
Six years ago, the Kirchner government, at loggerheads with the powerful Clarin media group, adopted legislation to hurt dominant players in the country’s media. But not much has changed since then. An analysis from Martin Becerra. October 2015 was the sixth anniversary of the audiovisual law that replaced a broadcasting act in Argentina, which was inherited…
A revised press code in Morocco was hoped to give journalists more room to report freely. But a closer look shows that nothing has really changed. The gravest legal threat to media freedom in Morocco are the laws that restrict the type of content that can be publicly communicated. The 2002 Press Code and the…