Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists wishes to express its grave concern about the criminal prosecution of four Yemeni journalists facing lengthy prison terms if convicted under Yemen’s press law for publishing controversial cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad. Their newspapers have all been ordered closed.
New York, February 23, 2006—The Committee to Protect Journalists is alarmed by the decision of a Cairo criminal appeals court today to uphold the conviction and one-year prison sentence of journalist Abdel Nasser al-Zuheiry for defamation. Al-Zuheiry, a reporter for the independent daily Al Masry al-Youm (The Egyptian Today), had lodged the appeal along with…
New York, February 23, 2006—The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns in the strongest terms the murder of three journalists on assignment in Samarra for the Dubai-based satellite news channel Al-Arabiya. The bodies of correspondent Atwar Bahjat, cameraman Khaled Mahmoud al-Falahi, and engineer Adnan Khairallah were found today near Samarra, a day after the station lost…
New York, February 23, 2006—A British reporter who recently recounted alleged human rights abuses in Ethiopia was denied press accreditation on Tuesday to work in the African country. Inigo Gilmore, whose report appeared in the London weekly TheObserver, told the Committee to Protect Journalists that he left the country the same day after Ethiopian authorities…
New York, February 23, 2006—Controversy over the publication of drawings of the Prophet Muhammed continued to grow as an international press freedom crisis on Thursday as Indian authorities imprisoned a magazine editor and Belarusian prosecutors opened a criminal probe into a weekly newspaper. In each case, the publications said they printed one or more cartoons…
New York, February 23, 2006—The Committee to Protect Journalists is alarmed by attacks and threats against ethnic Chinese journalists based in or near the U.S. cities of Atlanta, San Francisco, and New York. Journalists for the Falun Gong-affiliated newspaper and Web site Epoch Times told CPJ that they believe they have been targeted in retaliation…
Gentlemen: As you resume negotiations in Geneva today to establish a just and lasting peace in Sri Lanka, we call your attention to the urgent issue of journalist security. The free flow of information, a vital ingredient in establishing the peace, is jeopardized by ongoing violence against the press.
New York, February 22, 2006—The Committee to Protect Journalists is concerned that the Ugandan government has blocked internal access to a critical Web site, Radio Katwe, in the run-up to Thursday’s hotly contested presidential election. The site has been blocked in Uganda for more than a week, according to news reports and local journalists. The…
New York, February 22, 2006—The Committee to Protect Journalists welcomes the release from house arrest of Internet journalist Ahmed Didi, who was pardoned today, four years after receiving a life sentence because of his work. Dissident Naushad Waheed was also pardoned. “The release of our colleague Ahmed Didi is welcome but long overdue,” CPJ Executive…
New York, February 22, 2006—Prosecutors in the eastern city of Focsani today indicted journalist Sebastian Oancea for possessing classified military documents about Western forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, the second such arrest in less than week, according to local and international press reports. Oancea, Focsani correspondent for the national daily Ziua, faces up to seven…