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A group of more than 200 award-winning writers has today sent an open letter to British Foreign Secretary David Miliband, demanding that he seek information on the Libyan democracy activist Jaballa Matar (on the picture, right). Matar was abducted in 1990, and imprisoned without charge in Libya’s notorious Abu Salim prison.

The Azerbaijani government is using criminal laws and violent attacks to silence dissenting journalists, says Human Rights Watch in its report. Dozens of journalists have been prosecuted on criminal and civil defamation and other criminal charges. Police have carried out physical attacks on journalists, deliberately interfering with their efforts to investigate issues of public interest.

Index on Censorship welcomes Google’s announcement that it will no
longer co-operate with Chinese government censorship of its search engine
www.google.cn. Index on Censorship editor Jo Glanville: “Google’s decision to be transparent has already had a direct impact. This could be the start of a whole new approach to dealing with regimes that censor.”

The situation for journalists grows ever bleaker in Mexico as another newspaper editor José Alberto Velázquez López was shot dead lately last year. In Cuba, 26 print journalist remain imprisoned, bloggers attacked. Some positive news come from Argentina where the government fulfilled their promise to decriminalize defamation.

Reporters Without Borders is worried about the government’s plans to tighten control of the Internet in a country where free expression is already restricted. President Aliaksandr Lukashenka acknowledged on 30 December 2009 that his government is putting the final touches to a bill to this effect. The draft decree was leaked to the media on 14 December.

English PEN is calling on all members to take action on behalf of Liu Xiaobo and others detained in the People´s Republic of China. Liu Xiaobo, former President and Board member of Independent Chinese PEN Centre, was sentenced to eleven years in prison on 25 December 2009.

Two appalling events marked 2009: one was the largest ever massacre of journalists in a single day – a total of 30 killed –by the private militia of a governor in the southern Philippines and the other was an unprecedented wave of arrests and convictions of journalists and bloggers in Islamic Republic of Iran following President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s disputed reelection.

In 2009, Index on Censorship, English PEN and ARTICLE 19 became part of the Free Word Centre, an international centre for literature, literacy and free expression. The three organisations played a leading and formative role in the development of the centre. Here is a summary of the NGOs’ activities in 2009.

Ramirez, Miranda, Martinez, Montanez, Martín, Barrón, Ortega, Hernandez, Ibarra, Mendez, Vázquez, Robles. The killing of 12 journalists in Mexico this year and the failure to bring murderers to justice poses a serious problem for Mexican democracy, argues Ángel García Català in a comment ‘Mexico: democracy without voice’ for Index on Censorship.