Students took to the streets in downtown San José, Costa Rica on Thursday Nov. 15, to protest the country’s recently enacted and much reviled information crimes law, reported the Tico Times website.
Contrary to international conventions on freedom of expression and access to information, defamation cases in Brazil -- a country characterized lately by a high number of judicial cases against the media -- are still resolved in criminal courts.
The number of jailed journalists in Cuba has gone up since 2011, when the island disappeared from the Committee to Protect Journalists' census of incarcerated journalists.
After the vote was postponed four times because of a lack on consensus, the Internet Bill of Rights, a bill that establishes the rights and obligations of Internet users in Brazil, is back on the floor of the Chamber of Deputies Tuesday, Nov. 13.
Controversy erupted when a member of the Federal Authority for Audiovisual Communication Services (AFSCA in Spanish), the organization responsible for implementing the Media Law, mentioned a possible attempt to control the editorial stances of media outlets in Argentina.
The National Union of Journalists (CNP in Spanish) said that media companies all over Venezuela have been pressured by the government to end programs critical of the State, retire the journalists that run them and adjust their editorial tone.
The Inter American Press Association said a court order barring a newspaper in Ecuador from reporting on a lawsuit against it brought by a government official was a "serious attack on freedom of the press,".
A few hours after the Inter American Press Association named the well-known blogger Yoani Sánchez as their new freedom of expression delegate in Cuba, the Miami Herald and other news outlets reported that the journalist was detained on Thursday with a group of other dissidents.
The courts have become the greatest hurdle to freedom of expression in Brazil, according to international groups like Inter American Press Association and Freedom House. If judicial offensives are a hurdle for large media organizations, any participation in the political sphere by small websites and blogs can be a death sentence.
Despite opposition from journalism groups, the president of Costa Rica announced a new law would take effect punishing journalists and citizens with up to 10 years in prison for releasing "political secrets," according to the newspaper El País on Wednesday, Nov. 7.
The Brazil's Chamber of Deputies, the lower legislative house, approved two cyber-crime laws and set a date for the vote on an Internet Bill of Rights, reported the magazine Época on Nov. 7.
The dismissal of an online journalist in Colombia for writing an opinion column about the public relations practices of a Canadian oil company, as Clases de Periodismo reported, sparked outcry and reignited the debate about the influence of publicity on news coverage.