WKristoffer Aamot was a Norwegian journalist, magazine editor, politician and cinema administrator. As a young journalist he was sentenced to one year imprisonment for his writings in the newspaper Klassekampen. He was a member of the Oslo City Council from 1917 to 1937. He was a director of Oslo Kinematografer from 1934 to 1955, except for the war years. A film award was named after him.
WMaría Mercedes Aizpurua Arzallus is a Spanish journalist and politician from the Basque Country who currently serves as Member of the Congress of Deputies of Spain.
WBarrett Lancaster Brown is an American journalist, essayist and satirist. He founded Project PM, a research collaboration and wiki, to facilitate analysis of the troves of hacked emails and other leaked information concerning the inner workings of the cyber-military-industrial complex.
WMohamed Fadel Fahmy is an Egyptian-born Canadian award-winning journalist, war correspondent and author. He has worked extensively in the Middle East, North Africa, for CNN, BBC and Al Jazeera English.
WCarl Albert Fritz Michael Gerlich was a German journalist and historian, and one of the main journalistic resistors of Adolf Hitler. He was arrested, later killed and cremated at the Dachau concentration camp.
WRazan Ghazzawi is a Syrian-American blogger, campaigner and activist and currently a PhD researcher at the University of Sussex. She has been highly involved in the events during the Syrian Civil War, and has been particularly outspoken on activists' arrests and the violations of human rights committed by the Bashar al-Assad government. She was called "iconic blogger and leading activist" by The Telegraph. Jillian York wrote that Ghazzawi was "one of [her] heroes."
WPeter Greste is an Australian journalist and correspondent, who holds dual citizenship of Australia and Latvia. He has worked as a correspondent for Reuters, CNN and the BBC, predominantly in the Middle East, Latin America and Africa.
WFlorence Hartmann is a French journalist and author. During the 1990s she was a correspondent in the Balkans for the French newspaper Le Monde. In 1999 she published her first book, Milosevic, la diagonale du fou, reissued by Gallimard in 2002. From October 2000 until October 2006 she was official spokesperson and Balkan adviser to Carla Del Ponte, chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague.
WBambang Harymurti, commonly referred to by his initials BHM, is an Indonesian journalist and editor-in-chief of Tempo. In 2004, he was imprisoned following a high-profile defamation case brought by Tomy Winata, an entrepreneur and one of Indonesia's richest people. He is currently serving as deputy chair of Indonesia's Press Council.
WChittadhar Hridaya was a Nepalese poet. He is regarded as one of the greatest literary figures from Nepal in the 20th century.
WKhadija Rovshan qizi Ismayilova, also Ismailova, is an Azerbaijani investigative journalist and radio host who is currently working for the Azerbaijani service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, until recently as the host of the daily debate show İşdən Sonra. She is a member of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. In December 2014, Ismayilova was arrested on charges of incitement to suicide, a charge widely criticized by human rights organizations as bogus. On 1 September 2015, Ismayilova was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison under charges of embezzlement and tax evasion. On 25 May 2016, the Azerbaijani supreme court ordered Ismayilova released on probation. In December 2017, Ismayilova received the Right Livelihood Award, often referred to as "Alternative Nobel Prize", "for her courage and tenacity in exposing corruption at the highest levels of government through outstanding investigative journalism in the name of transparency and accountability." Ismayilova was not allowed to travel from Azerbaijan to Sweden to receive the award.
WTasneem Khalil is an exiled Bangladeshi journalist. He is Editor in chief Netra News, who previously worked for The Daily Star and was a stringer for CNN and a consultant for Human Rights Watch. During the 2006–2008 Bangladesh emergency, he was detained on 11 May 2007 and tortured while in the custody of Bangladesh's intelligence service. Khalil currently lives in Örebro, Sweden, where he is publisher and editor of Independent World Report, a world news magazine focused on human rights issues. He also works as a consultant of Bkash Ltd.
WAlexander Otroschenkov is a Belarusian political activist and journalist. In 2011 he was sentenced to four years in prison after he covered a protest rally as a journalist. He was listed by Amnesty International as a prisoner of conscience.
WOmar Radi is a Moroccan investigative journalist and human rights activist. He has worked at Lakome, Atlantic Radio, Media 24, TelQuel and Le Desk focusing on investigations about human rights, corruption and social movements. He was detained in Casablanca on 26 December 2019 for criticizing a judge in a tweet posted six months earlier.. His arrest triggered a massive movement of solidarity across the nation. He was handed a suspended four-month prison sentence, a verdict widely criticized by NGOs and human rights groups.
WNatalya Radina is a Belarusian journalist and the editor-in-chief of the independent news site Charter 97, which publishes many articles critical of the rule of Belarusian president Aleksandr Lukashenko.
WPaul Salopek is a journalist and writer from the United States. He is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and was raised in central Mexico. Salopek has reported globally for the Chicago Tribune, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, National Geographic Magazine and many other publications. In January 2013, Salopek embarked on the "Out of Eden Walk", originally projected to be a seven-year walk along one of the routes taken by early humans to migrate out of Africa, a transcontinental foot journey that was planned to cover more than 20,000 miles funded by the National Geographic Society, the Knight Foundation and the Abundance Foundation.
WSohail Sangi is a senior journalist and activist of the leftist movement in Pakistan, presently working with the daily newspaper Dawn. He is one of the visiting faculty of the Mass Communication Department at the University of Sindh.
WSaparmamed Nepeskuliev is a freelance journalist who has contributed to Alternative Turkmenistan News, a human rights group based in The Netherlands, and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a U.S.-sponsored independent media organization under the Broadcasting Board of Governors. Until July 2015, he worked in Turkmenistan reporting on "poverty, official privilege, failing infrastructure, and deficient schools" when he was detained on July 7 at the Awaza resort by agents from the Turkmen National Security Ministry. As of July 13, 2016, he still remains in prison. According to Freedom House's 2016 report on Global Press Freedom, Turkmenistan is the second least press-free country in the world.
WNajam Aziz Sethi is a Pakistani journalist, businessman and a former marxist who is also the founder of The Friday Times and Vanguard Books. Previously, as an administrator, he served as Chairman of Pakistan Cricket Board, caretaker Federal Minister of Pakistan and Chief Minister of Punjab, Pakistan.
WSiddhi Charan Shrestha was one of the most prominent writers of Nepal. He contributed to the struggle against the autocratic Rana regime (1846-1951) through his writings. His revolutionary poetry aroused freedom fighters, and he was sentenced to 18 years in jail for his literary activities. He wrote in Nepali Bhasa and Nepali.
WPhatte Bahadur Singh (1902–1983) was a Nepalese poet and journalist who started the first daily newspaper in Nepal Bhasa. He suffered persecution and was jailed for his activities to develop his mother tongue.
WBoris Vladimirovich Stomakhin is a Russian radical political activist, and editor of "Radical politics" periodical. He was convicted three times for hate speech, advocating a dismemberment of Russian Federation and genocide against Russian people. The convictions have been questioned by human rights organizations ARTICLE 19, Committee to Protect Journalists, and Union of Councils for Soviet Jews.
WSudarshan Mahasthavir (1938–2002) was a Nepalese Buddhist monk and author who played a major role in the development of Theravada Buddhism in Nepal and Nepal Bhasa literature. He was jailed by Nepal's repressive Panchayat regime for his activities supporting language rights.
WRoman Sushchenko is a Ukrainian journalist and artist. He was arrested in Russia on spying charges in 2016 and sentenced in 2018; his detention and sentence have been criticized by a number of Ukrainian and international agencies. Sushchenko was released in September 2019.
WMany journalists in Turkey are being persecuted and kept in jail all over the country. Below is an extensive list of the prisoners, past and present.
WVedat Yenerer is a Turkish journalist and writer. As a war correspondent he has visited over 75 countries, and he has published a number of non-fiction books. Since 2008 he has been a defendant in the Ergenekon trials.