Brazil

New York, September 29, 2009—U.S. freelance journalist Joe Sharkey, who covered a 2006 plane crash in Brazil in which he was a passenger, faces an onerous civil defamation suit for comments he said were wrongly attributed to him. On the third anniversary of the accident, the Committee to Protect Journalists calls on Brazilian judicial authorities to dismiss the case, which is based on the tenuous claim that the comments insulted the nation of Brazil.    

On July 31, 2009, Judge Dácio Vieira of the Federal District Court in Brasilia banned the Brazilian daily O Estado de S. Paulo and its Web site Estadão from publishing reports on an corruption scandal involving the family of former Brazilian President José Sarney, according to local news reports.

On July 16, 2009, police detained freelance photographer Antônio Carlos Argemi while he was covering a protest outside the home of Rio Grande do Sul Governor Yeda Crusius in Porto Alegre, 834 miles (1,342 kilometers) southwest of Brasilia.

New York, May 28, 2009--The Committee to Protect Journalists welcomes Wednesday's conviction in the June 2003 murder of Brazilian journalist Nicanor Linhares but calls on the authorities to ensure that all those involved in the killing of the radio host are brought to justice. 

News from the Committee to Protect Journalists

New York, May 7, 2009--The Brazilian Supreme Federal Tribunal's decision to strike down the 1967 Press Law, a measure that imposed harsh penalties for libel and slander, is a crucial step forward in the campaign to eliminate criminal defamation laws in the Americas, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. CPJ and other groups had long urged that the anachronistic law be removed from the books.

Combating impunity has been a long and difficult process, full of obstacles and problems. At the national level it has not been easy, so much of our work is carried out using the supranational tools that we helped develop. They began taking shape through international intergovernmental declarations, in conclusions reached by international legislative and judicial conferences and, especially, in opinions and decisions of the Inter-American Human Rights Court and Commission.

CPJ’s Impunity Index spotlights countries
where journalists are slain and killers go free

New York, March 23, 2009 -- The already murderous conditions for the press in Sri Lanka and Pakistan deteriorated further in the past year, the Committee to Protect Journalists has found in its newly updated Impunity Index, a list of countries where journalists are killed regularly and governments fail to solve the crimes. Colombia, historically one of the world’s deadliest nations for the press, improved as the rate of murders declined and prosecutors won important recent convictions.