Europe & Central Asia

MAY 13, 2005
Posted: May 17, 2005

Shamil Baygin, Reuters
Galima Bukharbayeva, Institute for War and Peace Reporting
HARASSED

Uzbek authorities detained and expelled journalists covering civil unrest in the northeastern city of Andijan.

New York, May 13, 2005—Uzbek authorities shuttered several foreign and domestic media outlets today during massive anti-government protests in the northeastern city of Andijan, leaving citizens without access to independent news about the unrest, according to local and international press reports.

Authorities blocked access to the foreign television channels CNN, BBC, and Moscow-based NTV at noon after 4,000 protesters stormed a prison in Andijan, freed up to 2,000 inmates, and seized the city administration building earlier in the day, according to press reports.

New York, May 12, 2005—The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns the detention and harassment this week of a Latvian television crew by local police and federal agents in Pytalovo, a district on the Latvia-Russia border.

Reporter Ivo Kirsblats, cameraman Maris Jurgensons, and driver Eriks Pakalns of the Riga-based Latvian public television LTV were detained for three hours on the morning of May 9 at the Pytalovo police station. Police forced them to destroy video footage and to leave the country by 6 p.m. that day, Kirsblats told CPJ in a telephone interview yesterday.

Dear Mr. Ganiev:

The Committee to Protect Journalists is greatly dismayed by your ministry's repeated and unfair denial of press accreditation to Marina Kozlova, Tashkent correspondent for United Press International (UPI).

Kozlova has worked as a journalist in Uzbekistan for 10 years and was officially accredited by the Foreign Ministry from 1998 to 2003, first as a correspondent for the Russian weekly Obshchaya Gazeta and since 1999 as a correspondent for UPI. Kozlova has faced repeated harassment in retaliation for her reporting on the mistreatment of journalists, human rights abuses by police, and torture in Uzbek prisons.

New York, May 10, 2005 – CPJ condemns the closure of the leading opposition weekly Respublika Delovoye Obozreniye (Republic Business Review) by The Kazakh Culture, Information, and Sports Ministry.

Last Thursday in Almaty, Kazakhstan's financial capital, Galina Dyrdina, the weekly's deputy editor told a press conference that editorial staff will not publish the paper's next issue but will appeal the May 4 closure order in court. The order contained no explanation of the reasons behind the closure, the weekly's staff said.

MAY 9, 2005
Posted: May 17, 2005

Ivo Kirsblats, LTV
Maris Jurgensons, LTV
LEGAL ACTION, CENSORED

The Latvian television crew members were detained by local police and federal agents in Pytalovo, a district on the Latvia-Russia border.

New York, May 4, 2005—Investigators in Azerbaijan's capital, Baku, said late yesterday that a 46-year-old Georgian citizen is the chief suspect in the March 2 murder of Elmar Huseynov, founder and editor of the opposition news magazine Monitor.

The National Security Ministry (MNB), which is conducting the inquiry into Huseynov's killing, identified the suspect as Tair Hubanov, according to local and international news reports. Using a different name, the man came to Huseynov's apartment several times in the week before the murder and inquired when the editor would be home, Rushana Huseynova, the victim's wife, told the Committee to Protect Journalists in a telephone interview today.

New York, May 2, 2005—A Belarusian court granted early release Saturday to two Russian journalists arrested last week while covering an opposition demonstration in the capital, Minsk, that marked the anniversary of the April 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. The journalists were freed along with 12 Russians who participated in the rally, according to local and international press reports.

The Committee to Protect Journalists said jailing the reporters was unjust because they were simply doing their jobs.

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