Press freedom

La Prensa, Nicaragua's oldest newspaper, had a blank front page this Friday for the first time in its 93 years. The special front page was protesting the government's refusal to deliver imported ink and paper.

Lucía Pineda, news director at the now-closed 100% Noticias in Nicaragua has been accused and arrested on terrorism charges against Daniel Ortega’s government.

Juan Carlos Arce, a lawyer for the Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights, (CENIDH), says social media sites are the most common vehicle to intimidate independent journalists during this period of government repression.

Sala IV justices ruled that Banco Nacional actions damaged the right to freedom of expression and citizens’ rights to accurate information.

One prominent Costa Rican journalist argued that a freedom of information law would only open the door to more onerous requirements for accessing public information.

Filmmaker Laura Poitras, whose documentary about fugitive intelligence leaker Edward Snowden won an Oscar, is seeking the release of six years of records that document how she was searched, questioned and sometimes held for hours at U.S. and foreign airports.

Reporters Without Borders ranked Costa Rica 16th out of 180 countries surveyed in its annual press freedom index. The ranking is Costa Rica’s best showing since 2002, when the country was listed at 15th, despite police intercepting phone records from a journalist at the daily Diario Extra.

Costa Rica remains a beacon of press freedom in a region where the average press freedom score fell to its lowest level in five years, according to the human rights organization Freedom House’s 2014 Freedom of the Press report.

On Friday afternoon, the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court ruled that the Prosecutor’s Office and the Judicial Investigation Police (OIJ) broke the law when they traced a journalist’s phone calls. The decision served as a strong rebuke to law enforcement and reinforced Costa Rica’s long history of respect for press freedom.

Costa Rica maintained an impressive ranking in the 2014 World Press Freedom Index released Wednesday, placing 21st worldwide for press freedom, third in the Americas and first in Latin America. But we queried whether recent scandals were taken into account.