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Newspaper editors in Bangladesh have staged a protest against a new digital security law they say will have a “chilling effect” on press freedom in the country. Sixteen members of a top editors council formed a human chain in front of the National Press Club in the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka, in a rare protest on […]

Newspaper editors in Bangladesh have staged a protest against a new digital security law they say will have a “chilling effect” on press freedom in the country.

Sixteen members of a top editors council formed a human chain in front of the National Press Club in the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka, in a rare protest on Monday, calling for an overhaul of the Digital Security Act.

They carried a banner urging the government to “abolish anti- free speech” provisions in the recently enacted law.

Mahfuz Anam, editor of the Bangladesh’s largest English-language newspaper, Daily Star, read out seven demands, including the scrapping of nine sections in the act which he said will curb media freedoms in the country.

“This law is incongruent with the intellectual environment of the digital age,” he said.