A deadly reporting field for Palestinian journalists
Palestinians make up 90% of the journalists and media workers killed by the IDF in CPJ’s database. (The other 10% were foreign correspondents; no Israelis were killed.) Those figures are partly a reflection of broader trends in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; over the last 15 years, 21 times more Palestinians than Israelis have been killed, according…
How Israel probes journalist killings
Israel’s procedure for examining military killings of civilians such as journalists is a black box. There is no policy document describing the process in detail and the results of any probe are confidential. If an incident taking place during active combat raises the suspicion of a violation of international law, the office of the army…
CPJ calls for Morocco to release journalist Taoufik Bouachrine 5 years after his arrest
CPJ has joined 41 other rights groups urging Moroccan authorities to immediately release journalist Taoufik Bouachrine, former editor-in-chief of local independent newspaper Akhbar al-Youm, on the fifth anniversary of his arrest in 2018. Bouachrine is serving a 15-year prison sentence on sexual assault charges that were brought in retaliation for his reporting. The joint statement…
Iran’s seizure of detained journalists’ devices raises fears of fresh arrests, convictions
Five months after the death of a young woman in morality police custody sparked widespread protests, Iranian authorities are charging journalists who covered the uprising with anti-state crimes. In many of these cases, authorities have powerful tools at their disposal to aid in convictions: journalists’ phones and laptops. CPJ counted at least 95 journalists arrested since the start of the protests….
Forensic tools open new front for using phone data to prosecute journalists
On April 13, police in Russia’s Khakassiya republic arrested Mikhail Afanasyev and seized his digital devices. Afanasyev, chief editor of the online magazine Novy Fokus, was detained based on an article about riot police in southern Siberia refusing to serve in Ukraine. He faces a possible 10-year prison sentence for spreading “false” information. It’s not surprising for…
In an Iran roiled by protests, journalists face a war of attrition
In mid-September, an enterprising young Iranian reporter named Niloofar Hamedi went to Tehran’s Kasra Hospital to report on a woman arrested by the county’s morality police for not properly wearing her hijab. That woman, 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, was in a coma after allegedly being beaten by police; she later died of her injuries. Hamedi, a…
CPJ joins call for release of Egyptian journalist Alaa Abdelfattah as he escalates hunger strike
CPJ has joined more than 60 civil society organizations in a letter calling Egyptian authorities to immediately release British-Egyptian blogger and activist Alaa Abdelfattah after he announced that he will escalate his hunger strike in prison. Abdelfattah, imprisoned since 2019, began a hunger strike in April of no more than 100 calories per day, which resulted in the severe…
CPJ submits reports on Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco to United Nations Universal Periodic Review
The human rights records of Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco are under review by the United Nations Human Rights Council through the Universal Periodic Review (UPR). This U.N. mechanism is a peer-review process that surveys the human rights performance of member states, monitoring progress from previous review cycles, and presents a list of recommendations on how a…
In Morocco, journalists – and their families – still struggle to cope with spyware fears
By CPJ MENA Staff Last July, when the Pegasus Project investigation revealed that imprisoned Moroccan journalist Soulaiman Raissouni was selected for surveillance by Israeli-made Pegasus spyware, the journalist could only laugh. “I was so sure,” his wife Kholoud Mokhtari said Raissouni told her from prison. Raissouni is one of seven local journalists named by the…
David Kaye: Here’s what world leaders must do about spyware
In late June, the general counsel of NSO Group, the Israeli company responsible for the deeply intrusive spyware tool, Pegasus, appeared before a committee established by members of the European Parliament (MEPs). Called the PEGA Committee colloquially, the Parliament established it to investigate allegations that EU member states and others have used “Pegasus and equivalent…