IPI Executive Director Alison Bethel McKenzie last week wrote a letter to Dominican Republic President Danilo Medina, urging the president to speed up reforms to the country’s press law after a second journalist was sentenced to prison for defamation in the country this year. That journalist, Melton Pineda, is currently planning to appeal a three-month […]

One step forward, two big steps backward in the fight against criminal defamation in Latin America: while a judge in Paraguay acquitted a journalist on defamation charges on Friday, reporters in the Dominican Republic and Cuba continued to face prison terms for libel. In Asunción, ABC Color columnist Alberto Candia had been the target of […]

Since his third term as president of the Dominican Republic ended in August, Leonel Fernández has been busy, recently embarking on trips to Europe and North America, where he received the “Statesman of the Year” award from the Canadian Council for the Americas, which recognised him for mediation and democracy-building efforts in Latin America. But […]

The International Press Institute (IPI) today condemned a judge’s ruling yesterday in the Dominican Republic that sentenced a journalist to three months in prison for defamation Melton Pineda is the second Dominican journalist to face prison for defamation in 2012, following the January conviction of Johnny Alberto Salazar, whose case was later overturned on appeal. […]