In North Korea, listening to a foreign broadcast is a crime punishable by death. In Colombia, right-wing paramilitary forces are suspected in the murders of three journalists in 2000. Meanwhile, paramilitary leader Carlos Castaño was formally charged with the 1999 murder of political satirist Jaime Garzón.
IN AN APRIL 19 SPEECH, PRESIDENT NURSULTAN NAZARBAYEV called for increased state oversight of the press-even though his decade in power was already marked by rigid control of independent expression. The National Security Committee (KNB, successor to the KGB) regularly harassed independent and opposition media last year. Journalists also faced countless defamation lawsuits filed by…
Your Excellency, The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is outraged by your government’s apparent efforts to shut down the independent newspapers SolDat and Vremya Po for reprinting articles from foreign media about alleged corruption in the Kazakh government.
Your Excellency, The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is disturbed by your government’s apparent efforts to intimidate, bankrupt, and ultimately silence the Almaty independent weekly Nachnem s Ponedelnika in response to its revelations of alleged official corruption.
Click here to read more about press freedom conditions in KAZAKHSTAN. New York, April 20, 2000 — A TV news director in Kazakhstan was dismissed under official pressure after she covered the harassment of three opposition leaders, according to CPJ’s sources in Almaty. On March 31, Tatyana Deltsova was fired from her job as news…
By Claudia McElroyAll over Africa, conflict continued to be the single biggest threat to journalists and to press freedom itself. Both civil and cross-border wars were effectively used as an excuse by governments (and rebel forces) to harass, intimidate, and censor the press–often in the name of “national security”–and in some cases to kill journalists…
By Chrystyna Lapychak Wars in Yugoslavia and Chechnya dominated regional and international headlines in 1999. The conflicts raised the journalists’ death toll in the region and prompted crackdowns, as governments blocked access to war zones and engaged in propaganda campaigns.
After securing reelection in a hastily arranged January snap poll, President Nursultan Nazarbayev continued to consolidate his grip on the press by harassing independent and opposition media, covertly buying out some outlets, and attempting to put others out of business. Nazarbayev boasts that his regime privatized state-run media but generally fails to mention that most…