SINCE ITS FOUNDING IN 1981, CPJ HAS, AS A MATTER OF STRATEGY and policy, concentrated on press freedom violations and attacks on journalists outside the United States. CPJ aims to concentrate its efforts on those countries where journalists are most in need of international support and protection. As a result, we do not systematically monitor…
URUGUAY IS HOME TO ONE OF THE MOST VIBRANT MEDIA SCENES in the Americas, but public officials frequently pursue criminal defamation cases against journalists, while state advertising is distributed to reward media that provide favorable coverage of the government. Uruguayan journalists say that criminal defamation cases have become commonplace in the last decade. Under Article…
AS PRESIDENT ISLAM KARIMOV’S GOVERNMENT CONTINUED its harsh crackdown on Islamic militants, officials kept local media on a tight leash. Uzbek human rights workers, themselves targets of bureaucratic harassment and violence, condemned numerous violations of the rights of their fellow citizens, including journalists. In April, CPJ raised the plight of three imprisoned Uzbek journalists in…
THE ANTAGONISTIC RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE MEDIA and President Hugo Chávez Frías, coupled with some alarming legal developments, prompted CPJ Americas program coordinator Marylene Smeets to visit Venezuela in October to investigate the situation. Read her special report on Venezuela. The report concludes that the president’s verbal fusillades seem to have given the population and authorities…
ALTHOUGH PRESIDENT CLINTON RECEIVED STAR TREATMENT during his historic visit to Vietnam in November, little news of the trip was allowed into the country’s state-owned press. Huge crowds greeted the first U.S. president to tour the country since the Vietnam War. Speaking in Ho Chi Minh City, Clinton urged the Vietnamese government to allow more…
SINCE THE UNIFICATION OF NORTH AND SOUTH YEMEN IN 1990, the Yemeni press has become exceptionally free by Arabian peninsula standards. But in the past six years, authorities have aggressively moved to narrow existing press freedoms via criminal prosecutions, censorship, and intimidation. Taken together, these actions have helped foster an increasing climate of self-censorship in…
PROSPECTS FOR PRESS FREEDOM IN YUGOSLAVIA BRIGHTENED when President Slobodan Milosevic finally accepted election results and resigned on October 6. The elected dictator’s all-out war on the independent media was a thing of the past, but official habits of intimidating the press did not disappear, and the difficulty of reforming Serbia’s state-run media became evident.…
AS TENSIONS WITH NEIGHBORING ANGOLA MOUNTED and politicians maneuvered to prepare for elections in 2001, Zambian journalists faced censorship, physical assault by police, and a host of repressive media laws. The most egregious attack on the independent press during the year was the trial of eleven journalists from the Lusaka daily The Post on charges…
JOURNALISTS IN ZIMBABWE FACED INCREASING DIFFICULTIES IN 2000, as President Robert Mugabe’s government tried to extend its control over the news in the face of serial political crises. Mugabe’s problems included a faltering economy, an unpopular military intervention in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a contentious election, and a controversial move to seize white-owned land.…
EIGHTY-ONE JOURNALISTS WERE IN PRISON AROUND THE WORLD at the end of 2000, jailed for practicing their profession. The number is down slightly from the previous year, when 87 were in jail, and represents a significant decline from 1998, when 118 journalists were imprisoned. While jailing journalists can be an effective means of stifling bad…