Moldova has emerged from the Soviet era with many of the problems that plague other states in the region: an ongoing separatist conflict dividing the nation’s ethnic populations, widespread government corruption, financial hardship, and a biased judiciary. Unlike many other former Soviet republics, however, Moldova has neither the natural resources nor the geopolitical importance to…
December 11 Jonathan C. Randal, The Washington Post The U.N. International War Crimes Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague (ICTY) ruled to limit compelled testimony from war correspondents. The decision, announced at the tribunal’s Appeals Chamber, came in response to the appeal by former Washington Post reporter Jonathan C. Randal, who had been…
Emboldened by the growing number of U.S. troops in the country, President Askar Akayev has used the threat of international terrorism as an excuse to curb political dissent and suppress the independent and opposition media in Kyrgyzstan. Compliant courts often issue exorbitant damage awards in politically motivated libel suits, driving even the country’s most prominent…
Political instability and social unrest plagued Moldova in 2002, with disenfranchised groups struggling against the country’s authoritarian president, Vladimir Voronin, and his ruling Communist Party. The country’s small and beleaguered nonstate media suffered from the feeble economy and official harassment, while state print and broadcast media endured heavy-handed censorship.
Press freedom is generally respected in the United Kingdom, but CPJ was alarmed by a legal case in which Interbrew, a Belgium-based brewing group, and the British Financial Services Authority (FSA), a banking and investment watchdog agency, demanded that several U.K. media outlets turn over documents that had been leaked to them. The case threatened…
New York, April 11, 2002—A bomb exploded last night (April 10) just outside the editorial offices of the Communist Party’s newspaper Kommunist in the Moldovan capital, Chisinau, CPJ has confirmed. The bomb, which was planted near the office entrance, caused structural damage to the building and shattered its windows, as well as those in a…
The exhilarating prospect of broad press freedoms that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union a decade ago has faded dramatically in much of the post-communist world. A considerable decline in press freedom conditions in Russia during the last year, along with the stranglehold authoritarian leaders have imposed on media in Central Asia, the Caucasus,…
Government pressure on the Moldovan media increased in 2001 after the Communist Party won a majority in the February parliamentary elections. The Communist candidate, Vladimir Voronin, was elected president in April. Soon after the presidential elections, the Chisinau-based Independent Journalism Center reported that journalists from the opposition publications Flux, Tara, Jurnal de Chisinau, and Trud-Moldova…
POLITICAL REFORMS AND ECONOMIC GROWTH, along with the advent of democratic governments in Croatia and Serbia, brightened the security prospects for journalists in Central Europe and the Balkans. In contrast, Russian’s new government imposed press restrictions, and authoritarian regimes entrenched themselves in other countries of the former Soviet Union, particularly in Central Asia, further threatening…