252 results arranged by date
ETHIOPIA The government unleashed a sudden and far-reaching crackdown on the independent press in November following clashes between police and antigovernment protesters that left more than 40 people dead. Authorities detained more than a dozen journalists, issued a wanted list of editors and publishers, and threatened to charge journalists with treason, an offense punishable by…
IRAN Hard-liners in government and the judiciary continued a crackdown on the independent media in general and on Internet journalists in particular. In the course of the year, authorities jailed Web bloggers, banned four newspapers for publishing a letter by a reformist cleric, and closed the Tehran bureau of the Arabic-language satellite-TV channel Al-Jazeera.
TOGO The death of President Gnassingbé Eyadema on February 5 gave local journalists hope that a new era of press freedom would follow years of repression. Instead, Eyadéma’s Rassemblement du Peuple Togolais (RPT) held on to power, resorting to censorship, harassment, and intimidation of the media as the army suspended the constitution and named the…
UZBEKISTAN President Islam Karimov engaged in a full-fledged offensive against the independent press. Unrelenting government persecution drove out more than a dozen foreign correspondents and local reporters working for foreign media; continual harassment forced at least two news agencies and a media training organization to close their offices. Karimov and his allies used trumped-up charges…
Moscow, February 10, 2006—The Belarusian government’s persecution of the country’s few independent newspapers undermines the integrity of the March 19 presidential election in which Aleksandr Lukashenko seeks a third term, the Committee to Protect Journalists and two regional press freedom organizations said today. The groups called on the Russian Federation, the European Union, and the…
Istanbul, Turkey, February 7, 2006—Scuffles erupted between riot police and Turkish nationalist lawyers at the start of the trial today of five journalists in a freedom of speech case given prominence by Turkey’s European Union application. After more than two hours of courtroom chaos, the judge adjourned the hearing until April 11 to allow the…
Istanbul, Turkey, February 6, 2006—Five prominent Turkish journalists are due to appear in court on Tuesday on charges of insulting the judiciary for criticizing a court decision to ban an academic conference on the killing of Armenians during the last days of the Ottoman Empire. The case has embarrassed Turkey, which is in negotiations to…
New York, January 26, 2006—A Polish journalist convicted in a rare criminal libel prosecution has been freed two days into his prison term after the country’s top constitutional court ordered the suspension of his sentence, according to news reports. Andrzej Marek, editor-in-chief of the weekly Wiesci Polickie in the town of Police, was released from…
New York, January 24, 2005—The Committee to Protect Journalists welcomes the dropping of charges of “insulting Turkishness” against an acclaimed author but is appalled that journalists still face jail under the same draconian statute. A court in Istanbul dismissed Monday the prosecution under Article 301 of the Turkish penal code of novelist Orhan Pamuk who…