The October murders of Armenian prime minister Vazgen Sarkissian and parliamentary speaker Karen Demirchian, by heavily armed gunmen who raided the Parliament building, shocked the nation and divided local media. While the assassins’ motives remained inscrutable at year’s end, some journalists jumped to the swift and as yet unsubstantiated conclusion that the killings represented an…
Azerbaijani press groups have proposed that August 6, 1998, the day that censorship was officially abolished, be declared Press Freedom Day. The move may be premature. While conditions have improved notably since then, journalists still must contend with lawsuits and threats of violence. The 1998 presidential decree that abolished censorship also dismantled Glavlit, the Soviet-era…
Journalists in Bangladesh were frequently subjected to physical assault, harassment, and intimidation as the country was wracked by political and criminal violence. The opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), led by former Prime Minister Begum Khaleda Zia, intensified its campaign to oust the current government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wajed, frequently calling countrywide strikes during…
President Aleksander Lukashenko, facing international condemnation for his boldfaced attempts to cling to power, resorted to increasingly crude tactics to rein in his media opponents. On July 20, President Lukashenko lost what little democratic legitimacy he still had when he refused to step down after his five-year term ended. Western countries, including the United States,…
Under the rule of President Mathieu Kerekou, who was elected in April 1996 after ruling as a left-leaning military dictator from 1972 until 1989, the Benin government has won international praise for its efforts to liberalize the country’s political environment. These efforts have not always worked to the advantage of local journalists. In January, the…
While President Hugo Banzer’s government used the state intelligence apparatus to intimidate journalists, the Bolivian press continued to report aggressively on a number of public scandals. Banzer, a general who led a military government from 1971 to 1978, publicly embraced press freedom after he was democratically elected president in 1997. But many local journalists are…
Journalists in Bosnia-Herzegovina suffered physical attacks that ranged from beatings and abduction to the car-bombing of a noted Bosnian Serb newspaper editor. The attack on Zeljko Kopanja came in October, after his Banja Luka paper published investigative reports about alleged war crimes and acts of corruption committed by Bosnian Serbs. Reports from the Helsinki Committee…
As Africa’s oldest multiparty democracy, with a code of human rights enshrined in the constitution, Botswana enjoys a relatively free and open press. Yet problems do exist, including the arbitrary use of the Immigration Act to silence foreign journalists working in the country by declaring them “prohibited immigrants.” One of the most contentious issues this…
While journalists in Brazil enjoy widespread popular support, restrictive laws pending before Congress and a number of violent attacks against the provincial press sparked concern among press freedom organizations in the country. Efforts to reform the 1967 press law, considered “undemocratic and anachronistic” by local reporters, stalled in the Chamber of Deputies. Although most local…
Sustained pressure from local journalists and domestic and international press freedom advocates, including CPJ, pushed the Bulgarian Parliament to modify its press law, eliminating jail sentences for libel. The reform, which was approved by Parliament on January 12, 2000, also forces public officials to press libel charges themselves rather than having the prosecutor’s office launch…