Peru

• Turkey lifted its ban on YouTube and then re-asserted it within the same week.
• Digital technology is helping get news out of North Korea. Small digital cameras and tiny SD memory cards make it easier to smuggle images out.
• In China, meanwhile, Amazon's Kindle 3G e-reader is reportedly being used to get the news in. Users are able to bypass the "Great Firewall."
• José Alejandro Godoy has the dubious honor of being Peru's first blogger to be sentenced under the country's criminal defamation laws.
• Facebook hopes to provide SSL access (i.e. secure, encrypted access) in the coming months. CPJ will continue to push other sites to make their services more spy- and censor-proof.
• Will future censorship be tailored to the individual, just as Internet ads are now?
• In September, Burmese exiled media were brought down with denial-of-service attacks. Is the entire domestic Burmese Internet now suffering the same fate?

New York, June 21, 2010—The Committee to Protect Journalists welcomes Friday’s decision by the Peruvian Supreme Court to release Alejandro Carrascal Carrasco, editor of the weekly newspaper Nor Oriente, who was sentenced on January 12 to one year in prison on defamation charges.

New York, June 10, 2010—The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns Wednesday’s sentencing of radio journalist Oswaldo Pereyra Moreno to one year in prison on criminal defamation charges in San Lorenzo, northern Peru, according to local news reports and CPJ interviews.

We will not make significant advances in the battle against crimes against journalists and the impunity surrounding them without the creation of a sense of unity and solidarity among a country’s news media and journalists. Nor will the cause advance without a strategy by international press freedom organizations to provide support for those two values.

Caretas, the leading newsweekly magazine in Perú, has a shocking photograph on its February 18 cover: a local judge aiming a gun at one of the publication’s reporters. Photojournalist Carlos Saavedra was on a stakeout trying to photograph Judge Raúl Rosales Mora when the incident occurred on February 13, according to CPJ interviews and local news reports.  

The magazine was working on a story about a controversial decision by Rosales, who had recently favored the appointment of a polemical judge to the country’s Constitutional Tribunal, the Peruvian press reported.

New York, February 9, 2010—In a controversial ruling, a Peruvian tribunal acquitted on Monday two alleged masterminds in the 2004 murder of radio reporter Alberto Rivera Fernández, the local press reported. The Committee to Protect Journalists today called on Peruvian judicial authorities to review the ruling and ensure that all those responsible for killing Rivera, left, are brought to justice.

New York, January 14, 2010—The editor of a Peruvian weekly newspaper in the Amazonian city of Bagua, Utcubamba province, was sentenced on Tuesday to one year in jail on defamation charges, according to local news reports. The Committee to Protect Journalists called today for his immediate release.

Alejandro Carrascal Carrasco, at right, editor of the Bagua-based weekly Nor Oriente, was convicted of charges that stemmed from a series of articles he wrote in 2005 alleging corruption in a local public educational institute, the journalist’s lawyer, Juan José Quispe, told CPJ. Victor Feria, former director of the institution, filed the defamation lawsuit, the local press said.