environment

We issued this statement on the first anniversary of the brutal attack on Mikhail Beketov, editor-in-chief of the Khimki-based independent newspaper Khimkinskaya Pravda, who was beaten nearly to death and left in his backyard. Beketov had criticized the Khimki administration’s decision to cut down a vast area of the region’s forest in order to build a highway. As a result of the attack, Beketov underwent a series of surgeries, had a leg and several fingers amputated, and is still hospitalized...

July marks the start of seal hunting season in Namibia, where hunters will be allowed to kill more than 90,000 seals. British journalist Jim Wickens and South African cameraman Bart Smithers filmed the event near Cape Cross Colony on Thursday morning for a British advocacy organization, Ecostorm. That is, until the journalists became the hunted.

New York, July 10, 2009--A judge in the northern state of Pará ordered prominent Brazilian journalist Lúcio Flávio Pinto, at left, on Monday to pay US$15,000 in damages in a civil libel suit. The decision is part of a systematic pattern of legal harassment against Pinto, who faces more than 10 lawsuits from powerful plaintiffs, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.

Environmental reporting around the world is under siege. Newsrooms in the United States are slashing budgets for the beat, and repressive countries are taking action to stifle reporting. Journalists are facing threats to their work--and sometimes, their lives. In the current issue of World Policy Journal, CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon calls on environmental and press freedom groups to work together to support journalists.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has tried to create an image apart from his mentor Vladimir Putin. Medvedev claims to support civil liberties, vows to combat corruption, and likes to speak about press freedom. In his first State of the Nation address last fall, Medvedev said the Internet was a guarantor of press freedom in Russia. 

Last weekend I participated in a conference in Venice, Italy, on climate change and the press. The meeting was hosted by former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev under the auspices on the World Political Forum, an organization Gorbachev founded in 2003 to foster discussion on "crucial problems that affect humankind."

CPJ interviewed documentary filmmaker Andrew Berends and producer Aaron Soffin at CPJ's headquarters in New York. Berends spent 10 days in the custody of Nigeria's State Security Services in Port Harcourt, from August 31 to September 9. He had been in the country for six months working on his film "Delta Boys." Soffin worked to get Berends released.

CPJ: Tell us about your film.

BERENDS: The film focuses on the militants in the region, but it's really dealing with what it's like living in the Niger Delta, a region that produces enormous amounts of oil. Billions of dollars of oil get pumped out of the Niger Delta, but in some places the people live in abject poverty. There is a lot of frustration over that. The militants claim they are fighting for more resource control. And there's a huge amount of corruption within the local government and then also among some of the militants who are supposedly fighting against that.

MARCH 14, 2008
Posted April 22, 2008

Croissance Saine Environnement
CENSORED

Gabon’s state-run National Communications Council indefinitely suspended Croissance Saine Environnement, a monthly newspaper published by a local environmental advocacy group of the same name, in connection with a series of stories critical of a government official, according to news reports and local journalists.

BRAZIL

Brazil's constitution guarantees free expression and prohibits censorship.
But in practice, the news media are impeded by defamation lawsuits so common they're known as the "industry of compensation" and by lower court judges who routinely interpret Brazilian law in ways that restrict press freedom.

Authorities won important convictions in the recent murders of two journalists, although Brazil remains a dangerous country for the press. Four journalists have been killed for their work in five years. As in much of Latin America, journalists who work in large government and business centers such as Brasília, São Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro often enjoy more protection than their colleagues in impoverished, isolated regions of the Amazon and the northeast. In the country's vast interior—where the influence of government is weak and that of drug trafficking and corruption, strong—journalists censor themselves for fear of retaliation.

Belém, Brazil, November 15, 2005—A leading Brazilian journalist being honored by the Committee to Protect Journalists with a prestigious International Press Freedom Award cannot attend the presentation this month because a series of punitive criminal lawsuits has made him a virtual hostage in his Amazonian hometown.

“It’s crucial for me to stay in Belém to follow up on the 18 lawsuits pending against me. I have to pay maximum attention to the finest details in the lawsuits. For all practical purposes I’m on house arrest,” said Lúcio Flávio Pinto, editor of semimonthly newspaper Jornal Pessoal.