[JURIST] A court in Yemen Wednesday prohibited the editor of Yemen's al-Hurriya newspaper and one of its reporters from writing for one month and also imposed a four-month suspended sentence on them for demeaning Islam by reprinting cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad [JURIST news archive]. The journalists, who say they will appeal, claimed they had published the cartoons to show readers how insulting they were to Muslims. The paper was initially shut down in March over the publication but was allowed to reopen [RWB report] in May.

Earlier this month the editor of the English-language Yemen Observer was fined 500,000 rials ($2,541) [JURIST report] for reprinting the cartoons, and in November the editor-in-chief of the al-Rai al-Aam newspaper was convicted and sentenced to one year in jail for the same offense. The cartoons depicting Muhammad originally appeared in a Danish newspaper in September 2005. They initially went unnoticed but violent protests erupted around the world [JURIST report] in February 2006 when they were republished in other papers in Europe, Asia, and the United States. Reuters has more.