turkey crackdown chronicle

John Otis, CPJ’s Andes correspondent, reports on Venezuela’s internet blackout and the impact it has had on Venezuelans’ ability to access news and information. Three journalists have been killed in the last week, in Afghanistan, Honduras, and Mexico. CPJ Asia Program Research Associate Aliya Iftikhar recently returned from a reporting mission to the Maldives, where…

In Saudi Arabia, journalist Zuhair Kutbi was arrested on unknown charges, and Eman Al Nafjan and Hatoon al-Fassi, two of the four female journalists critical of the ban on women driving whom Saudi authorities arrested last year, were tried. They appeared in court Wednesday on charges under the cybercrime law, including supporting “hostile elements.” In…

Egyptian photojournalist and CPJ’s 2016 International Press Freedom Award winner Mahmoud Abou Zeid, known as Shawkan, was released from prison on Monday after spending over five years in detention on anti-state charges. The conditions of his release, however, are arduous: he will be under “police observation” for five years, meaning he will have to appear…

New York Times correspondent David D. Kirkpatrick was denied entry into Egypt on Monday. His phone was confiscated and he was held in the airport for seven hours without food or water before authorities forced him onto a flight back to London without explanation. The move against Kirkpatrick comes after authorities detained a local journalist,…

The Philippine government’s legal harassment of the news website Rappler and Maria Ressa, its founder and executive editor, took an alarming turn Wednesday when officers from the National Bureau of Investigation arrested Ressa at Rappler‘s bureau in Manila and held her overnight over a cyber libel case filed against her by the Justice Department. Ressa’s…

CPJ hosted a press conference Thursday morning in front of the White House as the culmination of its #JusticeForJamal campaign to demand the Trump administration provide answers and accountability in the case of murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Two radio journalists were shot and killed in northern Afghanistan during a live program on Tuesday evening….

CPJ expressed concern that at least four journalists were surveilled under Project Raven, a United Arab Emirates cybersurveillance and hacking operation, according to a Reuters report. CPJ Middle East and North Africa Program Coordinator Sherif Mansour called the involvement of U.S. intelligence officials in the operation “disturbing.” CPJ North America Research Assistant Stephanie Sugars took…

A Myanmar court upholds the conviction of Reuters news agency reporters Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo. Investigative journalist Ahmed Divela shot dead in Ghana. In Romania, the EU GDPR privacy law is being used to try to muzzle investigative outlet, Rise Project. Global press freedom updates: CPJ Middle East and North Africa Program Coordinator…

CPJ releases its annual report on journalists killed in 2018. Mexican journalists face deadly dangers when covering crime and politics. Lawsuits and economic crisis drive Venezuela’s journalists into exile. CPJ’s annual report found that between January 1 and December 14, 2018, 34 journalists were murdered in reprisal of their work, nearly double the number of…

On Thursday, the Committee to Protect Journalists released its annual prison census–a snapshot of the number of journalists behind bars as of December 1, 2018. For the third consecutive year, at least 251 journalists are behind bars for their work, as authoritarian regimes increasingly use imprisonment to silence dissent. Read their stories here. Global press…