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New Iraqi rules will suppress news media

ReutersThe government of Nouri al-Maliki, right, takes an authoritarian turn with new broadcast regulations. The government says it will license journalists and ban anything it vaguely calls incitement to violence. The rules contravene the Iraqi constitution and international standards.
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Iran continues its war against journalists

APA new CPJ survey finds that Iran continues to wage an aggressive campaign to imprison independent and opposition journalists. Iranian authorities are now jailing at least 47 journalists, more than any single country since 1996. CPJ calls on Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, left, to end the campaign to silence critics.
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AP

Seeking justice
in Maguindanao

A new report asks why authorities have yet to arrest gunmen involved in the massacre in the Philippine province of Maguindanao. The report, compiled by press groups, including CPJ, says the international community must closely monitor the case. More than 30 media workers were slain.
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Database of slain journalists

Reprisals, censorship reported in Sri Lanka

APCPJ calls on Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa, right, to halt reprisals against critical journalists. Intimidation, censorship, and harassment are reported in the aftermath of the country's election. One critical reporter disappears and is feared abducted.
CPJ Blog: Reversing repression
Awardee free on bail
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AP

Reporters work
amid the ruins

Haitian journalists face daunting challenges after a massive earthquake, but some news outlets are resuming operations. As journalists struggle to balance their professional duties with severe family demands, CPJ is assisting those on the ground.
CPJ Blog: How to help
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3 journalists killed in 2010
801 journalists killed since 1992
516 journalists murdered with impunity since 1992
47 journalists imprisoned in Iran

New York, February 8, 2010—The Committee to Protect Journalists is outraged by a second prison sentence given to Hanevy Ould Dehah, editor of the online publication Taqadoumy, and calls on the Mauritanian judiciary to reverse the verdict on appeal. 

An update on the Karachi double bombing

(Reuters)On February 5, I blogged about three vicious bomb blasts in Pakistan in the previous two days—“one in Lower Dir that wounded three reporters on Thursday, and Friday’s double attack in Karachi that we’re still investigating.” I argued that media companies in Pakistan must start taking responsibility for protecting their employees in the field. I had trouble rounding up names and numbers of those hurt in the second Karachi blast, at Jinnah Hospital, left, but the Pakistan Press Foundation (PPF), which is based in Karachi, has come up with a tally of 12 journalists and media workers injured. PPF is a go-to organization for us, a place where I always check in when I’m in Karachi. If you’re a Pakistan media watcher, it’s a fundamental, extremely reliable source to have bookmarked. 

Chinese writer ends Japanese exile after 90 days in airport

A Chinese dissident who writes about rights abuses is ending an involuntary exile in Japan on Friday. Or so he hopes.

Feng has a reservation to leave Japan on February 12. (CPJ)

Feng Zhenghu has booked a flight departing Japan’s Narita Airport for Shanghai at 9:45 a.m. on February 12. That was the topic of an impromptu press conference held Monday afternoon in the brightly lit lobby of the Nippon Press Center Building in central Tokyo.  A small crowd of Chinese and Japanese journalists clustered round him snapping photos while an anxious security guard paced up and down, interrupting every now and then to ask the group to disperse. 

Internews provides critical news to use in Haiti

A Haitian refugee in a Port-au-Prince camp listens to the radio. (AP)

Every evening, between 9 and 10 p.m., people in areas affected by the January 12 earthquake listen to the program “Nouvel pou nou Konnen” (News to Know). Huddled in tents or sitting in the open air, men and women cling to their transistor radios to get news on the latest decisions of the Haitian government or agencies coordinating international assistance in affected areas. The program comes via the California-based media development agency Internews, which opened a press center in the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, in order to bridge the information gap following the destruction of most media outlets in this city.

Freedom of information laws struggle to take hold in Africa

Is Sri Lanka done assaulting the media?

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Freedom of information laws struggle to take hold in Africa

Monitor reporter Angelo Izama, right, went through the courts to gain access to government documents and was denied. (Monitor)

In Uganda, a ruling this week in a landmark case of two journalists seeking to compel their government’s disclosure of multinationals oil deals highlighted the challenges to public transparency just before media leaders, press freedom advocates, officials, and former U.S. President Jimmy Carter gather in Ghana next week at the African Regional Conference on the Right of Access to Information.

Ugandan police take two Monitor journalists to court. (Isaac Kasamani/Monitor)
New York, February 3, 2010—An opinion column in Uganda’s leading independent newspaper suggesting parallels between President Yoweri Museveni and former Philippine leader Ferdinand Marcos led to criminal libel charges against two journalists today, according to local media reports.

New York, February 1, 2010—An Ethiopian judge sentenced a journalist to prison on Friday in connection with a January 2008 column that criticized Prime Minister Meles Zenawi’s statements about religious affairs in Ethiopia, according to local journalists.

Press freedom gets red card as World Cup approaches

Police patrol the World Cup grounds in South Africa. (AFP)As South Africa prepares to host the 2010 World Cup and “soccer fever” reaches its height, press freedom may be left on the benches. Police have recently subpoenaed two journalists working for private station e.tv to reveal their sources in a story about a scheme to commit violent crimes during the big event.
 
On January 16, e.tv interviewed two masked, self-confessed criminals who claimed they planned to steal from tourists in town for the Cup. The police and ruling African National Congress party were not pleased with the bad publicity. Now the police want to use apartheid-era legislation to force News Editor Ben Saidi and reporter Mpho Lakaje to reveal the identity and contact details of the two sources.

A new mission for Somalia’s Mustafa Haji Abdinur

Journalist flees Zimbabwe after death threat

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Internews provides critical news to use in Haiti

A Haitian refugee in a Port-au-Prince camp listens to the radio. (AP)

Every evening, between 9 and 10 p.m., people in areas affected by the January 12 earthquake listen to the program “Nouvel pou nou Konnen” (News to Know). Huddled in tents or sitting in the open air, men and women cling to their transistor radios to get news on the latest decisions of the Haitian government or agencies coordinating international assistance in affected areas. The program comes via the California-based media development agency Internews, which opened a press center in the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, in order to bridge the information gap following the destruction of most media outlets in this city.

Tomás Eloy Martínez, passionate press freedom advocate

Martínez (Reuters)

Argentine writer and journalist Tomás Eloy Martínez, who died on Monday after a long battle with cancer, was ranked among Latin America’s most prominent intellectuals. Best known for his novels about former President Juan Domingo Perón and his wife Eva, Martínez cared deeply about press freedom and was a passionate advocate who helped scores of Argentine reporters, and was actively involved in CPJ’s efforts to campaign on behalf on Cuban imprisoned journalists.

Martínez understood the difficulties journalists face while working on dangerous assignments or under repressive regimes. In 1975, he was forced to flee Argentina after serious threats from a right-wing paramilitary group. He lived in exile during the dictatorship era, and returned briefly to the country after democracy was restored in 1983.

Radio Metropole: A station in Haiti running out of steam

Radio Metropole’s staff have lost their homes, and the station has lost 80 percent of its advertisers since the quake.

Radio Metropole’s journalists, coping in a tent set up in the garden of the radio station’s office in Port-au-Prince, have not still resumed their normal pace of work because of the trauma caused by the January 12 earthquake. The station resumed its normal programming on February 1, after broadcasting news via the Internet for two weeks. 

Journalist Marcus Garcia pushes onward in Haiti's chaos

Amid Haiti’s chaos, Marcus Garcia struggles every day to fulfill his duty as journalist. He said he routinely goes up and down the streets of Port-au-Prince in search of fuel for his car. When talking on the phone, the tone of his voice indicates the difficulties he encounters as a journalist willing to keep doing his job in the aftermath of the January 12 earthquake. Garcia feels the toll as heavily as anyone right now: He lost his wife in the disaster.

Videos show Haiti's community radio stations in ruins

Mexican publisher shot to death in Guerrero

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An update on the Karachi double bombing

(Reuters)On February 5, I blogged about three vicious bomb blasts in Pakistan in the previous two days—“one in Lower Dir that wounded three reporters on Thursday, and Friday’s double attack in Karachi that we’re still investigating.” I argued that media companies in Pakistan must start taking responsibility for protecting their employees in the field. I had trouble rounding up names and numbers of those hurt in the second Karachi blast, at Jinnah Hospital, left, but the Pakistan Press Foundation (PPF), which is based in Karachi, has come up with a tally of 12 journalists and media workers injured. PPF is a go-to organization for us, a place where I always check in when I’m in Karachi. If you’re a Pakistan media watcher, it’s a fundamental, extremely reliable source to have bookmarked. 

Chinese writer ends Japanese exile after 90 days in airport

A Chinese dissident who writes about rights abuses is ending an involuntary exile in Japan on Friday. Or so he hopes.

Feng has a reservation to leave Japan on February 12. (CPJ)

Feng Zhenghu has booked a flight departing Japan’s Narita Airport for Shanghai at 9:45 a.m. on February 12. That was the topic of an impromptu press conference held Monday afternoon in the brightly lit lobby of the Nippon Press Center Building in central Tokyo.  A small crowd of Chinese and Japanese journalists clustered round him snapping photos while an anxious security guard paced up and down, interrupting every now and then to ask the group to disperse. 

Is Sri Lanka done assaulting the media?

It was good to hear Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa point out in his Independence Day speech on Thursday that the country “cannot be developed with harassment, gross punishments or by the gun.” But the sentence that followed that—“Discipline is not revenge”—gives cause for concern. Rajapaksa’s speech marked the 62nd anniversary of the country’s independence from Britain. It was delivered in Kandy, the heartland of the president’s electoral base.

Google-China debate keeps Internet security in spotlight

Google's Bejing office. (AP)

Google has gone quiet since its announcement last month that it was unwilling to continue censoring search results on Google.cn in China. The Washington Post reported Thursday that the company is seeking help from the U.S. government to trace hackers behind security breaches, which it said targeted its own intellectual property and individual human rights activists. A Reuters analysis said the company may also be grappling with the financial and legal implications of ceasing censorship in defiance of Chinese law.

Regardless of Google’s next step or the motivations behind it, the company’s January 12 statement has already had a positive effect: Journalists and human rights activists who have long complained about e-mail security in relation to China have a much wider audience for their concerns. 

Time to step up protection for media in Pakistan

Journalists injured in Pakistan bombings

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New York, February 4, 2010—The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns a court order issued on Monday that banned all Kazakh media and printing houses from publishing “any information that discredits the honor and dignity” of President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s son-in-law, a high-ranking energy executive.

A man peruses newspapers in Dushanbe. (Reuters)

New York, February 3, 2010—The Committee to Protect Journalists today called on judges in Tajikistan’s capital, Dushanbe, to drop their defamation lawsuits against three popular independent weeklies for damage amounts that would bankrupt them.

Karimov chastises Uzbekistan’s 'toothless' reporters

ReutersAddressing the joint session of Uzbekistan’s parliament on Wednesday, President Islam Karimov urged his lawmakers to be more active in their work, saying that laws should address public needs, and blaming the local press corps for being “toothless” in its reporting, regional news Web site Ferghana reported.  

In his speech, available on the parliament’s Web site, Karimov, at left, said the legislative body should strengthen its control over the executive branch of the government, and added that the success of this process largely depends on “active participation of mass media.”

We issued the following statement today in response to sustained distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on the server hosting the Web version of the independent Moscow-based newspaper Novaya Gazeta; the Web site has been disabled since January 26 according to newspaper staff who spoke with CPJ...

Journalist charged with defaming Uzbeks, faces 8 years jail

In meeting, delegation presses for Fatullayev’s freedom

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New York, February 8, 2010—The Committee to Protect Journalists is outraged by a second prison sentence given to Hanevy Ould Dehah, editor of the online publication Taqadoumy, and calls on the Mauritanian judiciary to reverse the verdict on appeal. 

New York, February 5, 2010—Muhammad al-Maqaleh, editor of the opposition Yemeni Socialist Party’s news Web site Aleshteraki, who was detained in September has finally appeared in government custody. He is being held without charges, local news outlets reported, and alleges that he has been tortured.

New York, February 4, 2009—The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns an Egyptian criminal court’s decision on Tuesday to sentence a journalist to one year in prison and a fine of 60,000 Egyptian pounds (US$10,500) on criminal charges filed by another journalist who is also a member of parliament.

New York, February 4, 2010An Iraqi government plan to impose restrictive rules on broadcast news media represents an alarming return to authoritarianism, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. CPJ denounced the rules and called on Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his government to abandon their repressive plan.

Saudi operator Arabsat takes Iran’s Al-Alam network off air

With 47 journalists in jail, Iran sets notorious records

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The Committee to Protect Journalists is an independent, nonprofit organization founded in 1981. We promote press freedom worldwide by defending the rights of journalists to report the news without fear of reprisal.
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2009 prison census

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Journalists in Prison 2009

Reporting in
the ruins

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on the crisis in Haiti.