When U.S.-led forces waged an offensive in Fallujah in November and a state of emergency was declared, the Iraqi interim government’s Higher Media Commission directed the media to “set aside space in your news coverage to make the position of the Iraqi government, which expresses the aspirations of most Iraqis, clear.” Those that didn’t comply…
OverviewBy Joel Campagna The conflict in Iraq led to a harrowing number of press attacks in 2004, with local journalists and media support workers primarily in the line of fire. Twenty-three journalists and 16 support staff—drivers, interpreters, fixers, and guards—were killed while on the job in Iraq in 2004. In all, 36 journalists and 18…
YemenYemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh said in May that he would work to decriminalize press offenses. Yet three months later, a prominent editor who published opinion pieces opposing the president’s handling of a bloody armed rebellion was sentenced to a year in prison, and his newspaper was suspended for six months.
New York, March 8, 2005—Lawyers representing an imprisoned journalist were beaten by security forces during a hearing last week to appeal the prison sentence of Yemeni editor Abdelkarim al-Khaiwani. Jamal al-Jaabi, one of al-Khaiwani’s lawyers, told CPJ that the day of the hearing, March 2, he and colleague Naji Mohamed Allaw were invasively searched before…
Washington, D.C., February 8, 2005—A delegation from the Committee to Protect Journalists met with Yemen’s ambassador to the United States, Abdulwahab Abdulla al-Hajjri, today to express deep concern about the imprisonment of a Yemeni opposition newspaper editor and a recent spate of criminal convictions handed down against several other journalists. Abdelkarim al-Khaiwani, editor of the…
Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists is alarmed by a series of criminal convictions handed down against several Yemeni newspaper editors and reporters in reprisal for their work. These convictions have severely undermined press freedom in Yemen.
Around the world, 122 journalists were in prison at the end of 2004 for practicing their profession, 16 fewer than the year before. International advocacy campaigns, including those waged by the Committee to Protect Journalists, helped win the early release of a number of imprisoned journalists, notably six independent writers and reporters in Cuba.
The emergence of outspoken private and party newspapers following the unification of North and South Yemen in 1990 has set the country apart from many of its neighbors in the Persian Gulf, where the press remains tightly controlled. Yemeni papers are notably opinionated and not shy about confronting the government. But the government’s record on…