New York, May 13, 2002—Panamanian journalist Miguel Antonio Bernal will go to court tomorrow morning to face criminal defamation charges filed in 1998 by then-National Police director José Luis Sosa. During a February 1998 broadcast of the news program “TVN-Noticias,” Bernal held the National Police responsible for the decapitation of four Coiba Island Prison inmates…
New York, June 5, 2007—The Committee to Protect Journalists joins with our colleagues at the Tribal Union of Journalists (TUJ) in mourning the death of Noor Hakim Khan, a correspondent for the Daily Pakistan and vice president of the TUJ in Peshawar. According to local media reports, Hakim was one of five people killed by…
New York, April 5, 2002— CPJ is outraged that Israel Defense Forces (IDF) fired stun grenades and rubber bullets at reporters outside the Ramallah compound of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Israeli troops fired stun grenades at a group of at least two dozen reporters attempting to cover the pending arrival of U.S. Mideast envoy Anthony…
New York, May 10, 2002—A Mexican newspaper publisher appeared on Wednesday, May 8, before a public prosecutor in Mexico City to respond to criminal defamation charges brought against him by a local politician. Alejandro Junco de la Vega, president and publisher of the Mexico City daily REFORMA, was charged over an article alleging that Carlos…
New York, May 10, 2002–In the latest wave of Iran’s ongoing crackdown on the press, the country’s conservative Press Court has sentenced two journalists to prison and banned three newspapers during the last two weeks. CPJ learned that on May 8, Iran’s Press Court convicted Mohsen Mirdamadi, a member of Parliament and director of the…
New York, May 9, 2002—The Committee to Protect Journalists is extremely concerned about a series of menacing threats against four Colombian journalists, including an incident yesterday. At around 6:30 a.m. on May 8, two men approached Carlos Pulgarín—a journalism professor at the Universidad de La Sabana, a private university in the capital, Bogotá—as he was…
New York, May 8, 2002—The Committee to Protect Journalists is deeply concerned by yesterday’s decision of the Appeals Board of the Supreme Court to reinstate a Defense Ministry decree that was used to convict and jail Russian journalist Grigory Pasko. Pasko was convicted of treason in December 2001, based on the charge that he intended…
New York, May 8, 2002—The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) condemns the Monday, May 6, confiscation of the intellectual and political magazine Wijhat Nadhar. Wijhat Nadhar editor El-Mostafa Soulaih told CPJ that staff contacted him from Al-Najah al-Jadidah printing press in Casablanca and told him that agents from the secret service, the Direction de la…
Your Excellency: Joel Simon and I enjoyed the opportunity to meet with you and Ambassador Rashid Alimov on April 19 to discuss press freedom conditions in Tajikistan. We very much appreciate Your Excellency’s commitment to review a letter from us outlining our concerns and a number of press freedom cases we have documented. Unfortunately, government harassment, intimidation, and censorship regularly stifle press freedom in Tajikistan. The political factionalism that erupted during the 1992-1993 civil war, as well as the murders of many journalists killed during the conflict, has lead to widespread self-censorship.