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…
Russian reporters beaten; both covered highway project
New York, November 8, 2010–The Committee to Protect Journalists denounces two attacks on journalists in the Moscow region and calls on authorities to end impunity in crimes against reporters in Russia. Both victims, Oleg Kashin of the business daily Kommersant and Anatoly Adamchuk of the independent weekly Zhukovskiye Vesti, have covered a contentious highway project…
Russia pledges to pursue journalist murder probes
Moscow, September 30, 2010–Top Russian investigators have pledged to pursue 19 cases of murdered journalists presented to them by a delegation from the Committee to Protect Journalists, reopening several closed cases and pursuing new leads in a number of other probes.
Global Media Forum cites risks of environmental reporting
He’s young, unemployed and carries himself with the innocence of a man who hasn’t spent much time outside his own village. But Egyptian blogger Tamer Mabrouk is the real deal. Appearing at an international media conference in Bonn, Mabrouk’s description of chemical dumping into a brackish lagoon on the northern Nile Delta near the Mediterranean Sea…
Beketov still recovering from attack a year later in Russia
Those familiar with Mikhail Beketov’s ordeal describe his survival as nothing short of a miracle. The once fit, towering 51-year-old who campaigned on environmental issues and criticized his city government’s policies through the pages of his newspaper is now gone. But the former editor of Khimkinskaya Pravda, an independent publication that exposed the blunders of the Khimki…
Russia must effectively investigate Beketov case
We issued this statement on the first anniversary of the brutal attack on Mikhail Beketov, editor-in-chief of the Khimki-based independent newspaper Khimkinskaya Pravda, who was beaten nearly to death and left in his backyard. Beketov had criticized the Khimki administration’s decision to cut down a vast area of the region’s forest in order to build…
Joel Simon on environmental journalism
Environmental reporting around the world is under siege. Newsrooms in the United States are slashing budgets for the beat, and repressive countries are taking action to stifle reporting. Journalists are facing threats to their work–and sometimes, their lives. In the current issue of World Policy Journal, CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon calls on environmental and press…
In Russia, independent paper faces harassment
We issued this statement today after the Russian press reported the brief detention and harassment by Khimki police of two people handing out copies of the independent newspaper Khimkinskaya Pravda, whose editor, Mikhail Beketov, remains hospitalized two months after unknown attackers beat him nearly to death…
Attacks on the Press in 2008: Russia
When Vladimir Putin’s handpicked successor, Dmitry Medvedev, won 68 percent of the vote in Russia’s presidential election March 2, many saw in the new leader a moderate technocrat who might liberalize the country’s press policies. In his May 7 inauguration speech, Medvedev declared that the protection of human rights and freedom would drive “the sense…