WITH NO FUNCTIONING CENTRAL GOVERNMENT IN RECENT YEARS, Somalia remains fractured into rival fiefdoms controlled by warlords. Threats to local journalists have been correspondingly decentralized. In the last months of 2000, however, newly-elected president Abdiqasim Salad Hassan and a new transitional legislature tried with some success to assert central authority. (Both Hassan and the legislature…
A LONG-AWAITED REPORT ON MEDIA AND RACISM IN POST-APARTHEID South Africa was issued in August, to the relief of many who had feared it might erode constitutional protections for press freedom. Titled Faultlines, the report of the quasi-independent South African Human Rights Commission (HRC) was the end result of an investigation announced in late 1998,…
DESPITE PRESIDENT KIM DAE JUNG’S INTERNATIONAL REPUTATION as a champion of democracy, capped with a 2000 Nobel Peace Prize, he has an uneasy relationship with the domestic press. While South Korean media are generally far more free under Kim’s administration than at any time in recent history, they remain susceptible to government interference. Tensions between…
PRESS FREEDOM IS GENERALLY RESPECTED IN SPAIN, and CPJ does not routinely monitor conditions in the country. However, a series of attacks on journalists by the Basque separatist group ETA, including the murder of a prominent columnist from the Madrid daily El Mundo, greatly alarmed journalists during 2000, forcing many to leave the Basque region…
RI LANKA’S LIVELY AND COMBATIVE MEDIA FACED NUMEROUS CHALLENGES from a hostile government, with the most intense battle waged over the president’s tightening of censorship restrictions. Press coverage of the country’s 17-year-old civil war remained thin, due to intermittent censorship and because the government refused to grant journalists regular access to the conflict areas in…
IN DECEMBER, STRONGMAN OMAR HASSAN AL-BASHIR WON overwhelmingly in presidential elections that were boycotted by Sudan’s two main opposition parties. Both parties had conditioned their participation on an end to the 17-year civil war and to human-rights abuses, including restrictions on the press. State harassment of journalists and newspapers has been a persistent feature of…
After enduring four years under a government dominated by the party of strongman Desi Bouterse, journalists in Suriname breathed a bit easier when Ronald Venetiaan returned to power in August, as the leader of a coalition of ethnic parties that had won the popular election in May. Soon after taking office on August 12, Venetiaan,…
PRESIDENT HAFEZ AL-ASSAD’S DEATH IN JUNE, after a 30-year reign, marked the passing of one of the most repressive dictators in modern Middle Eastern history. Assad ruled a police state that eliminated political opponents and stifled all independent debate. No independent or private media existed, and newspapers, television, and radio were mere propaganda outlets for…
WITH NO LEGAL FRAMEWORK TO PROTECT FREEDOM OF SPEECH, journalists in Swaziland are at the mercy of a government that actively discourages critical reporting about the royal family and the political system in general. King Mswati III is Africa’s last absolute monarch. He rules by decree, maintaining a decades-old ban on political parties and labor…
TAIWAN’S FREEWHEELING MEDIA GENERALLY OPERATE with little interference from a government that presents itself as a model for democracy in the region. However, the young administration of President Chen Shui-bian and his Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) did suffer a few embarrassments arising from its treatment of (and by) the press. Chen narrowly won election in…