Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is writing to protest the recent suspension of the weekly newspaper Al-Shumou. CPJ has learned that the Ministry of Information issued an order for the indefinite closure of the newspaper on February 3. Seif al-Hadheri, Al-Shumou’s editor-in-chief, told CPJ that the ministry provided no explanation for its action and that officials have refused to discuss the matter with him. He surmised that the closure came in response to Al-Shumou’s various “criticisms of government ministers.”
Read first-hand accounts by journalists covering the war in Afghanistan. • December 21, 2001—The New York Times reported that on December 20, Afghan tribal fighters detained three photojournalists working for U.S. news organizations. The journalists were detained for more than one hour, apparently at the behest of U.S. Special Operations forces in the Tora Bora area….
Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is deeply concerned about government harassment of independent and opposition media in Yemen. In recent weeks, we have documented a disturbing pattern of censorship and intimidation of journalists in response to their professional work.
ALTHOUGH RIGHTS TO FREE EXPRESSION AND PRESS FREEDOM are enshrined in national constitutions from Algeria to Yemen, governments found many practical ways to restrict these freedoms. State ownership of the media, censorship, legal harassment, intimidation, and imprisonment of journalists were again among the favored tools of repression and control. In Iraq, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Syria,…
SINCE THE UNIFICATION OF NORTH AND SOUTH YEMEN IN 1990, the Yemeni press has become exceptionally free by Arabian peninsula standards. But in the past six years, authorities have aggressively moved to narrow existing press freedoms via criminal prosecutions, censorship, and intimidation. Taken together, these actions have helped foster an increasing climate of self-censorship in…
Al-Ayyam is the first and only Yemeni newspaper to interview Abu Hamza Al-Masri. “I Paid A lot of Taxes to the ‘Non-Believers’ and Now I Reap the Benefits” [Published in Al-Ayyam, August 11, 1999] [CPJ Editor’s Note: This translation has been edited for style].
By Joel CampagnaRoyal succession and rubber-stamp elections set the tone for a year in which Middle Eastern and North African governments continued to restrict press freedoms through a combination of censorship, intimidation, and media monopoly. Ballots in Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen produced few surprises as longtime rulers stayed in power and maintained formidable obstacles…