Video: Campaign to free the press
(CNN) The imprisonment of journalists hit a record high in 2012, driven by the growing use of anti-terrorism charges to silence critical voices. This video, a centerpiece of CPJ’s new Free the Press campaign, details the plight of imprisoned journalists worldwide and describes how international advocacy can make a difference in winning the freedom of…
Expelled from Cuba jails, journalists languish in Spain
In 2010, following midsummer negotiations between the Catholic Church and the government of President Raúl Castro, Cuban authorities began releasing imprisoned journalists, sending them into forced exile with their families. In April 2011, the last of more than 20 journalists arrived in Spain. They had been granted liberty and respite, and were promised support from…
Cubans exiled in Spain: Integration or disintegration?
Desperate realities call for hope. It is not just a game of words, because you don’t play with hunger and the future (my own and my family’s). It is about going deeper into another version of circumstances. And seeing the rainbow where others see a gloomy sun and a stubborn and relentless rain.I am writing…
In Nairobi, plans to improve aid to exiled journalists
Kassahun Yilma left Ethiopia quickly in December 2009. He didn’t have time to save money for the journey, choose a place to go, arrange housing or a job. He left his wife, his mother, his house and all his friends behind. Yilma didn’t know what lay ahead. He only knew that if he stayed, he…
A month for remembrances, outrage, and action
Three years ago Sunday, an unidentified assailant gunned down veteran crime reporter José Armando Rodríguez Carreón in the driveway of his home as his 8-year-old daughter watched. Amid a climate of violence and impunity in Mexico–where 10 journalists have been slain since 2008 and no killers convicted in any case–it seems unlikely that anyone will…
Beketov back on his feet, and a long road awaits
Mikhail Beketov can walk now–using an artificial leg and propping himself on crutches. He’s moving around his house in the Moscow suburb of Khimki. It was here, in his front yard, where the newspaper editor was attacked two years and seven months ago. It was in this yard where assailants left him for dead. The…
Help journalists in need: An appeal
Mikhail Beketov is lucky to be alive, although I’m sure there are days when he doesn’t think so. On November 13, 2008, the environmental reporter who campaigned against a highway that would have destroyed a forest in Khimki, a town outside Moscow, was beaten nearly to death by men with metal bars. The attackers made…
For Eritrean expatriate press, intimidation in exile
For the better part of the last 20 years, Tedros Menghistu has been a refugee, forced to flee his Red Sea homeland of Eritrea not once, but twice—first as a young man displaced by war in the early 1990s, and then as a professional journalist escaping political censorship and military conscription a decade later. Menghistu is also…
Starting from scratch: A Haitian journalist exiled in the U.S.
I arrived in New York in April 2003. It was cold.The streets of Brooklyn seemed too wide to me and the buildings huge. The number 3 train would pass over and over again like a luminous monster. From the window of my apartment, I would watch this train go by. I would also watch people walk without…
Living in limbo: The ongoing wait of journalists in exile
The e-mails started on July 15, 2009, and have continued ever since—pleas for help from Iranian journalists who fled their country often with little money and scarce provisions to northern Iraq, Turkey, Afghanistan, India, and a host of other locales around the world. Many lived in hiding throughout Iran for weeks or months before crossing perilous borders…