georgy-gongadze

UKRAINE:

New York, March 17, 2008—An appeals court in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, convicted on Saturday three suspects in the 2000 abduction and murder of Internet journalist Georgy Gongadze. The court sentenced a former police officer, Nikolai Protasov, to 13 years in prison; his fellow officers, Valery Kostenko and Aleksandr Popovych, were given 12-year terms. A fourth suspect—head of the Interior Ministry’s criminal investigation department under former President Leonid Kuchma, Gen. Aleksei Pukach—is still being sought on an international arrest warrant. The masterminds of the crime are still at large, according to international press reports and CPJ sources.

Intense political rivalries among a trio of powerful leaders created a chaotic and highly politicized environment in which journalists were vulnerable to a variety of abuses. Parliamentary elections in September and negotiations to form a new government in the succeeding months intensified pressure on journalists to take sides. In November, Ukraine’s two pro-Western parties formed a fragile coalition that returned Orange Revolution leader Yulia Tymoshenko to the prime minister’s post she once held. Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Russian politician who was prime minister for more than a year, found himself the odd man out, but it was uncertain how long Tymoshenko’s alliance with President Viktor Yushchenko could last.

Marlene Garcia-Esperat is among dozens of reporters murdered in the Philippines. Unlike all the others, though, her case might actually be solved.

Some press gains are reported in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan but the Color Revolutions have yet to deliver lasting reforms.

The assassin in a baseball cap who gunned down Anna Politkovskaya outside her Moscow apartment used a silencer. But reverberations from the contract-style slaying of Russia's icon of investigative journalism were felt around the world.

Press freedom advances spawned by the Orange Revolution eroded in 2006 as political power struggles yielded the return of repressive tactics and attitudes toward the media. In October, the Kyiv-based Institute for Mass Information (IMI) said the number of beatings and threats against journalists had reached 32, double the number reported in all of 2005. There were no reported journalist murders or imprisonments, but limited progress in prosecuting past killings, and the failure to pursue the masterminds behind the crimes, contributed to an overall climate of impunity.

February 2007

News from the Committee to Protect Journalists

Moscow, January 23, 2007—Russia’s prosecutor general has opened a criminal investigation into several police officials in Chechnya who may have killed reporter Anna Politkovskaya because she was about to publish an article alleging their involvement in torture. The information was disclosed to a delegation from the Committee to Protect Journalists in a meeting on Monday with Foreign Ministry spokesman Boris Malakhov.

By Mathew Hansen

Hundreds of journalists have been killed over 15 years, many on the orders of government officials. Few cases are ever solved. In the Fall/Winter 2006 edition of Dangerous Assignments

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By Heidi Hoogerbeets