Iraqi court ruling against Guardian seen as part of crackdown on media

The court ruling in which the Guardian was ordered to pay the Iraqi prime minister damages of 100m dinar (£52,000) is part of a wider crackdown against media outlets designed to discourage scrutiny of public officials, according to one of the country's leading journalism bodies. The Journalists Freedom Organization, which has lobbied for press freedoms for the past six years, says the Iraqi media have been inundated by writs from officials in recent months and have lost official access and status to state-backed organizations. "Legal cases have flooded from all sides into publishers and media outlets throughout Iraq," said one of the organization's members, Jabar Dharad. "This is a very effective tactic to silence dissent. A key reason for the diminishing status of private media here is that parliament hasn't passed a law to protect journalists in Iraq. They are deliberately delaying doing so." The prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, and several of his ministers have launched at least four legal actions against foreign press outlets over the past year. The Guardian, the New York Times and the wire service AP have all been served with writs, while Al-Jazeera has been forced out of Iraq, allegedly because of an anti-government bias. Local outlets are also being targeted, with representatives from the staunchly anti-government Al-Sharqiya channel now banned from all government events and buildings and the Al-Baghdadia channel, made famous by the shoe-throwing antics of its former reporter Muntazer al-Zaidi, also under threat of a boycott.