Ro Sawyeddollah has lived in a refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, since he fled Myanmar along with thousands of other ethnic Rohingya in 2017, where the U.N. found that Rohingya live under threat of genocide.
Given that a staggering number of imprisoned journalists are held in jails across the Asian continent, CPJ and other groups call on leaders of these countries to release them at this time of grave public health concern.
Bangkok, March 10, 2020 — The Myanmar army should drop its criminal defamation complaint against the Reuters news agency and should stop using legal threats to intimidate the press, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.
Hopes for greater press freedom when Myanmar moved to quasi-democratic rule were quickly quashed with the jailing in 2017 of two Reuters reporters. Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo have their freedom again, but journalists and press freedom activists who met with CPJ’s Senior Southeast Asia Representative Shawn Crispin in Yangon in June said that…