Amid ongoing attacks on journalists, CPJ advocacy in Europe
and

Amid ongoing attacks on journalists, CPJ advocacy in Europe
and
New York, September
18, 2009—The Committee to Protect Journalists urges Georgian authorities to
drop criminal charges against the Tbilisi bureau chief for the Russian news
agency RIA Novosti and allow him to work without fear of harassment. According
to RIA Novosti, Besik Pipia is facing up to three years in prison if convicted
on a criminal charge of document forgery.
CPJ’s Joel Simon, Robert Mahoney, and Nina Ognianova pay tribute to journalists who died in 2008. The toll was highest in Iraq, but conflicts in South Asia and the Caucasus were deadly as well. Impunity in journalist murders in Russia, Philippines, and Mexico were top issues.
New York, September 9, 2008—The Committee to Protect Journalists welcomes today’s release of Telewizja Polska (TVP) crew members who were detained outside the Georgian village of Karaleti by South Ossetian militia members, and taken into custody in the regional capital, Tskhinvali on Monday.
Reporter Dariusz Bohatkiewicz told CPJ that authorities in Tskhinvali transferred him and his colleagues—cameraman Marcin Wesołowski and driver Levan Guliashvili—to Russian peacekeepers who turned them over to Georgian authorities and Polish diplomats. TVP crew’s equipment and car were returned undamaged.
New York, September 8, 2008—South Ossetian and Russian authorities should immediately release three members of a Polish television crew detained today near the village of Karaleti in the buffer zone between South Ossetia and Georgia, the Committee to Protect Journalists said. Authorities confiscated equipment and cell phones from the Telewizja Polska (TVP) crew and were holding the three members incommunicado in the regional capital, Tskhinvali, according to CPJ sources.
Bob Dietz called attention to the Chinese propaganda department's recent 21-point press directive, first reported by the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong. The whole thing in English and Chinese is posted today at Berkeley's China Digital Times. Among the orders given to the domestic media during the Olympic Games is that they are not to report on the protest zones set up at three places around Beijing. This apparently holds true even if they are empty, which they are.