Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists is writing to protest your government’s ongoing legal campaign against the Peruvian journalists group Asociación Prensa Libre, and in particular against Prensa Libre member Guillermo Gonzales Arica. We believe this campaign is designed to quell investigative journalism in Peru.
New York, December 14, 1999 Argentina seems likely to become the first Latin American country in which journalists cannot be jailed for criticizing public officials. In the course of next week, an Argentine senate commission is expected to approve a bill decriminalizing libel and defamation. “This will affirm the press freedom that Argentine journalists…
October 12, 1999 — Murray Hiebert, the Far Eastern Economic Reviewcorrespondent imprisoned in Kuala Lumpur on September 11, was released yesterday morning, according to a spokesman for Reviewpublisher Dow Jones. “My spirits are in good shape and I managed to come out in one piece,” Hiebert told Canadian TV from Hong Kong (as quoted by Reuters).
April 12,1999 — The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), a nonpartisan orginazation dedicated to the defense of press freedom around the world, is saddened and angered by the cold-blooded assassination of Slavko Curuvija, a publisher and editor in chief of the Belgrade-based daily Dnevni Telegraf and the weekly Evropljanin. Ann Cooper, CPJ’s executive director, called the…
New York, December 10, 1999 — In the latest official crackdown on local independent media organizations, financial police blocked accounts and froze assets of the Belgrade daily, Glas Javnosti, and of a printing company, ABC Grafika, this week. The organizations are charged with failing to pay taxes, a claim both deny. Managers at the newspaper…
New York, December 8, 1999 — The Belgrade daily newspapers Blic and Danas and the Studio B television station have been fined a total of 970,000 dinars (about $32,333 at the official rate of exchange) in a defamation case brought against them under the Serbian Information Law. The fines were announced Wednesday afternoon following a…
Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is deeply concerned about recent death threats against Sunday Standard reporter Ray Choto. The threats began in November, shortly after Choto returned to Zimbabwe after collecting an international press freedom award in Canada, along with his colleague Mark Chavunduka, editor of the Sunday Standard. On November 21 a package arrived at Choto’s home in Harare, containing a teddy bear, two live bullets, and a note threatening him and his family. Two other independent journalists, Basildon Peta of the Financial Gazette and Ibbo Mandaza of the Zimbabwe Mirror, received anonymous threats at around the same time.
New York, December 3, 1999 — Pablo Emilio Medina Motta, a cameraman with the regional television station, TV Garzón, was killed by multiple shots to the head and back when more than 100 leftist guerrillas stormed the town of Gigante in Huila department. Six other people died and twenty were wounded in the attack. Medina…
New York, N.Y., December 6, 1999 — Three Egyptian journalists jailed for libel in August were freed late Sunday night after an Egyptian appeals court overturned their sentences. Magdy Hussein, editor in chief of the opposition biweekly Al-Sha’b, Saleh Bedeiwi, a reporter for Al-Sha’b, and Essam Eddine Hanafi, a cartoonist for the paper, were convicted…