The Uighur writer and historian Tohti Tunyaz (pen-name Muzart - the name of the largest river in the part of Xinjiang Province, north-west China, where he was born) was arrested in 1999 while on a research trip to the Uighur Autonomous Region from Japan, where he was living with his wife and children and studying for a PhD in Uighur history and ethnic relations. He was sentenced to 11 years [...]

Tewodros Kassa, formerly the editor-in- chief of the weekly newspaper Ethiop, was sentenced to a two-year prison sentence in July 2002 for supposedly "fabricating information that could incite people to political violence" and "disseminating false information through the newspaper". These charges related to three articles published in 2001, and his sentence began immediately.

Tewodros Kassa was first imprisoned in June 2000, again for supposedly fabricating information which could incite people [...]

Ibtissam Berto Sulaiman al-Dakhil, an Iraqi journalist formerly married to a Kuwaiti citizen, was sentenced to life imprisonment in Kuwait in June 1991 for allegedly writing for an Iraqi government paper during Iraq's occupation of Kuwait. She claims she was threatened and told that she and her daughters would be assaulted if she did not co-operate. Recent information suggests that she might have been conditionally released under a deportation order. [...]

Pressing against the trunk, he twists around

and back to test the resilience of the branch,

the rope, the safety of his position,

then crawls along a bough - a primate

in his habitat. When he stops to rest and

contemplate the distracting criss-cross of last

season's twigs, plot his next move and where

to cut yet not harm the tree's structure,

he becomes again a modern human.

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