Coinciding with a call by international organizations for increased freedom of expression on the Internet, a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) report urges governments to support internet use as a human right, GigaOm reports.
Zezé Perrella, the president of the Brazilian soccer team Cruzeiro and former federal and state deputy for Minas Gerais, has vowed retaliation against a journalist, Amália Gurgel, of the newspaper Hoje em Dia, after a May 29 story that revealed Perrella had not declared all his possessions or property, according to the blog Chico Maia.
A bill that would criminalize leaking or publishing information on confidential criminal investigations and trials passed committee in Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies May 31, O Globo reports.
Representatives from the United Nations, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the Organization of American States, and the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights signed the "Joint Declaration on Freedom of Expression and the Internet", a document that urges governments not to limit freedom of expression online, reported EFE.
In response to government attempts to approve laws regulating the press, the Brazilian National Association of Newspapers (ANJ in Portuguese) launched on May 26 a self-regulation program, reported Folha de S. Paulo.
Brazilian senator Delcídio do Amaral, elected by the state of Mato Grosso do Sul, is suing the news website Terra and reporter Italo Milhomem Santos for roughly $63,000 for publishing supposedly untrue information, according to Portal Imprensa.
A judge in the Dominican Republic has ordered TV reporter José Agustin Silvestre de los Santos held on $5,250 bail pending a trial for allegedly defaming a La Romana prosecutor in a report accusing the official of ties to drug trafficking, Diario Libre reports.
Journalists from Argentine media outlets like Clarín, La Nación, Perfil, Telefé, TN, DyN, El Trece and others were thrown out of an event organized by the association Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, reported Clarín. A woman with the organization of mothers whose children were disappeared during Argentina's Dirty War, told a photographer with Clarín: "These are the rules of the game, you are not welcome here."
Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa canceled his column in the Peruvian newspaper El Comercio in protest of its "information manipulation" during the ongoing presidential election campaign, according to the news agency EFE. The protest is part of various critiques against the newspaper for supporting candidate Keiko Fujimori and for its impartial election coverage.
A week before the second round of presidential voting between Keiko Fujimori and Ollanta Humala, a Calandria Social Communicators Association study says that the El Comercio media company has taken Fujimori’s side in the race, the Inter Press Service reports.
Press groups in Bolivia criticized the “hasty” and “incomplete” reform of the Electoral Systems Law, which will continue to bar media outlets from reporting on or airing opinions about judicial elections, Los Tiempos reports.
In September 2010, Folha de S. Paulo (The São Paulo Journal) used the courts to shut down the Falha de S. Paulo (The São Paulo Failure) parody site for infringing on Folha’s copyright in its name, website address, and graphics. Eight months later, lawyers for the newspaper have said the site can return in its original form if it does not use the visual aspects of the paper’s brand, explains the parody site’s blog, "Sorry for our Failure."