When Moroccan authorities released three prominent journalists in July as part of a mass pardon marking King Mohamed VI’s 25 years on the throne, their friends and families celebrated. But the excitement was short-lived. Taoufik Bouachrine, Soulaiman Raissouni, and Omar Radi have been shamed in the media, stalked, and harassed since their release as they…
One year in, Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza has exacted an unprecedented and horrific toll on Palestinian journalists and the region’s media landscape. At least 128 journalists and media workers, all but five of them Palestinian, have been killed – more journalists than have died in the course of any year since CPJ…
The Committee to Protect Journalists has submitted a report on the state of press freedom and journalist safety in Iraq and semi-autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan to the United Nations Human Rights Council ahead of its January to February 2025 Universal Periodic Review (UPR) session. The U.N. mechanism is a peer review of each member state’s human…
When exiled Russian news website Meduza was hit with a flood of internet traffic in mid-April, it set off alarm bells among the staff as the deluge blocked publishing for more than four hours and briefly rendered the site inaccessible for some readers. It was the largest distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) attack in…
The Israel-Gaza war has been devastating for civilians, including journalists covering the conflict. While a few conflicts have taken the lives of hundreds of journalists over a period of years, no other war has taken so many journalists’ lives in such a short time span, according to CPJ data that has been gathered since 1992. Here…
After serving a 14-month prison sentence on various charges, Algerian journalist Mustapha Bendjama assumed his life would return to normal as the editor-in-chief of Le Provincial, a local independent newspaper in the northeastern city of Annaba. “I was wrong,” said Bendjama, who was released April 2024. In a phone interview with CPJ, Bendjama revealed that his contract at…
I was 13 when my father moved our family from Libya back to my parents’ hometown of Deir al-Balah in central Gaza. It was 1994, a time of optimism. Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization had signed the Oslo Accords and Palestinians were heading toward an independent state. Gaza, with its successful businesspeople and its…
Gaza journalists Shrouq Al Aila and Roshdi Sarraj were on a work trip in Saudi Arabia last fall when their home became a war zone. The married couple quickly returned to Gaza to report and to be with their community. But Sarraj, the founder of local production company Ain Media, would only manage to produce…
Israel’s surprise attack on Al-Shifa hospital in northern Gaza on March 18, and the two weeks of fighting that followed, resulted in hundreds of deaths and a trail of destruction. It also left a morass of contradictory information about exactly who was killed there, who was arrested, and who went missing. As the Israel-Gaza war…
On February 17, 2024, Iraqi Kurdish journalist Guhdar Zebari was released from prison, concluding a three-and-a-half year legal saga that saw him convicted on anti-state and other charges in retaliation for his work. Zebari is one of the so-called “Badinan prisoners” – a group of journalists and activists from the ethnic Badinani group who were…