european-union

New York, June 13, 2008--The Committee to Protect Journalists is concerned by the June 7 arrest of Salidzhon Abdurakhmanov, an independent Uzbek journalist for a number of international news outlets.

Police arrested Abdurakhmanov in the city of Nukus for alleged drug possession, independent news Web site Uznews reported. If convicted, Abdurakhmanov faces up to five years in prison, Uznews editor and CPJ International Press Freedom awardee Galima Bukharbaeva told CPJ. Abdurakhmanov was reporting on economic, human rights, and social issues and Uzbek prisons for Uznews at the time of his arrest.  

New York, June 13, 2008—The Committee to Protect Journalists is concerned by the June 7 arrest of Solidzhon Abdurakhmonov, an independent Uzbek journalist for a number of international news outlets.

Police arrested Abdurakhmonov in the city of Nukus for alleged drug possession, independent news Web site Uznews reported. If convicted, Abdurakhmonov faces up to five years in prison, Uznews editor and CPJ International Press Freedom awardee Galima Bukharbaeva told CPJ. Abdurakhmonov was reporting on economic, human rights, and social issues and Uzbek prisons for Uznews at the time of his arrest.  

Five years after the Castro government cracked down on the independent press, more than 20 journalists remain behind bars for the crime of free expression.

The murder of an outspoken newspaper editor underlined a troubling year in which journalists continued to be the targets of criminal prosecution and government censorship.

Hrant Dink, the Turkish-Armenian editor of the bilingual weekly Agos, was gunned down outside his newspaper’s Istanbul office on January 19. Dink had received numerous death threats from nationalist Turks who viewed his iconoclastic journalism, particularly on the mass killings of Armenians in the early 20th century, as an act of treachery. In a January 10 article in Agos, Dink said he had passed along a particularly threatening letter to Istanbul’s Sisli district prosecutor, but no action had been taken. Dink’s murder rekindled memories of the not-too-distant past, when murders of journalists were common in Turkey. In the 1990s, 18 Turkish journalists were killed for their work, many of them murdered, making it the eighth-deadliest country in the world for the press. Few of the cases were solved.

Tension remained high between the independent news media and President Paul Kagame’s government in the run-up to the 2008 parliamentary elections. Authorities summarily closed two private newspapers, stripped critical newspapers of vital advertising revenue, and jailed one journalist and harassed others in response to critical coverage. The bloody legacy of the 1994 genocide continued to affect press freedom as the government and its supporters invoked claims of hate speech to silence dissenting voices.

Facing a week of massive protests in the capital, Tbilisi, President Mikhail
Saakashvili stunned Western allies in November by imposing a state of emergency, banning broadcast news reporting, closing two television stations, and deploying police to forcefully disperse demonstrators. Saakashvili defended the November 7 crackdown, saying that the protests were orchestrated by Moscow with the intention of overthrowing his government. After acceding to opposition demands for early presidential elections, Saakashvili lifted the state of emergency and the news-gathering ban nine days later. But by then, he had damaged his own reputation as a pro-Western reformer.

President Nursultan Nazarbayev and his administration played down the country’s troubling press freedom and human rights record as they successfully pursued chairmanship of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), the Vienna-based human rights monitoring body.

One prominent editor was slain and other journalists faced escalating government harassment, violent attacks, and lawlessness amid intense political rivalry between President Kurmanbek Bakiyev and opposition parties in parliament. In the face of recurring protests, Bakiyev periodically made political concessions to the opposition, only to withdraw or undermine the agreements after demonstrators had gone home. Seemingly focused on political obfuscation, the administration was unable to effectively tackle widespread crime, corruption, and poverty, and Bakiyev became steadily more reliant on authoritarian policies to keep the upper hand with opposition parties, civil society activists, and independent journalists.