Attacks on the Press 2006: Countries That Have Jailed Journalists
ALGERIA: 2 Djamel Eddine Fahassi, Alger Chaîne III IMPRISONED: May 6, 1995 Fahassi, a reporter for the state-run radio station Alger Chaîne III and a contributor to several Algerian newspapers, including the now-banned weekly of the Islamic Salvation Front, Al-Forqane, was abducted near his home in the al-Harrache suburb of the capital, Algiers, by four…
Attacks on the Press 2006: Iran
IRAN With world attention focused on Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the hard-line government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad turned the screws on press freedom and intimidated critical journalists into silence or self-censorship. Ahmadinejad, who has pursued the conservative parliament’s policy of relentlessly stifling independent journalism since his election in August 2005, used the nuclear debate to deflect…
Attacks on the Press 2006: Countries That Have Jailed Journalists
ALGERIA: 2 Djamel Eddine Fahassi, Alger Chaîne III IMPRISONED: May 6, 1995 Fahassi, a reporter for the state-run radio station Alger Chaîne III and a contributor to several Algerian newspapers, including the now-banned weekly of the Islamic Salvation Front, Al-Forqane, was abducted near his home in the al-Harrache suburb of the capital, Algiers, by four…
Iranian journalist languishes in jail without charge
New York, January 9, 2007-The Committee to Protect Journalists is deeply concerned by reports that an Iranian journalist has been held in Tehran’s Evin Prison for more than 40 days without charge. Ali Farahbakhsh, a former economics and foreign affairs reporter for the banned reformist dailies Yas-e No and Shargh, was detained by security officers…
Appeals court upholds jail sentence of Kurdish journalist
New York, September 15, 2006—The Committee to Protect Journalists is alarmed by the ruling of an Iranian appeals court upholding a one-year prison sentence against Kurdish journalist and human rights activist Mohammad Sadiq Kabudvand. The court of appeals in the northwestern province of Kurdistan ordered him to serve the suspended jail term, the semiofficial Iranian…
Authorities close prominent critical daily and a monthly
New York, September 11, 2006—The Committee to Protect Journalist condemns the closure of Iran’s most prominent critical newspaper today for failing to remove an executive accused of publishing blasphemous articles and insulting officials. Authorities shuttered the daily Sharq saying it had not replaced managing director, Mohammad Rahmanian, as ordered in a letter on August 10,…
Two journalists freed on bail
June 15, 2006 Original Alert: February 16, 2006 Elham Afroutan and Mohsen Dorostkar, Tammadon-e Hormozgan IMPRISONED On January 29, Mohsen Dorostkar, editor-in-chief of Tammadon-e Hormozgan, and Elham Afroutan, a journalist for the weekly, were among seven journalists jailed after publishing a satirical article written by an Iranian Web blogger in Germany, and likening Iran’s 1979…
State paper closed, editor and cartoonist charged
New York, May 23, 2006—The Committee to Protect Journalists is concerned by the closure today of an Iranian state newspaper, and the arrest of its editor-in-chief and a cartoonist who published a cartoon that sparked riots by ethnic Azeris in the northwestern city of Tabriz. Tehran’s chief prosecutor, Saeed Mortazavi, ordered the arrest of Mehrdad…
The world’s most censored countries
Could you pick out Equatorial Guinea on the world map? Or Turkmenistan, or Eritrea? Probably not at the first attempt. These countries are usually below the radar of the international media, and the autocrats who run them like it that way. It helps them crush press freedoms and keep their population in the dark. That is why the Committee to Protect Journalists, a New York-based press freedom group, has drawn up a league table of the world’s 10 most censored countries. We hope that the list, issued on World Press Freedom Day, will shine a light into the dark corners of the world where governments and their political cronies decide what people will read, see, and hear.