Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists urgently calls on your interim government to quickly and unconditionally restore provisions guaranteeing press freedom that were enshrined in your country’s recently abolished 1997 constitution.
New York, October 4, 2006—The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns the three-year prison sentence given today to a critical journalist in Azerbaijan on what local press freedom activists called trumped up drug charges. Sakit Zakhidov, a prominent reporter and satirist for the daily opposition newspaper Azadlyg, was convicted of drug use by a court in…
New York, October 4, 2006-The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns this week’s arrest of Rudy Apolo, a columnist and publisher of the Asian Star Journal and Asia Star Balita, and three members of his editorial staff on a criminal defamation charges related to reports on alleged government corruption. The four were arrested Monday morning in…
New York, October 3, 2006—The Committee to Protect Journalists deplores local authorities’ ongoing harassment of the independent weekly Permsky Obozrevatel, one of the few sources of independent news in the western Russian city of Perm. “We are deeply concerned by the continuing harassment of Permsky Obozrevatel,” CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon said. Perm police detained…
New York, October 3, 2006—The Committee to Protect Journalists is deeply concerned by death threats on Islamist Web sites against a controversial commentator for the French daily Le Figaro over an article critical of the Prophet Muhammad. Robert Redeker, a high school philosophy teacher in the southwestern city of Toulouse, has gone into hiding under…
OCTOBER 3, 2006 Posted: October 13, 2006 El Meridiano de Sucre HARRASSED Several groups of unidentified individuals stopped distributors for the Sincelejo-based daily El Meridiano del Sucre, threatened them with guns and bought the majority of that day’s edition, which featured a story linking local government officials to paramilitary leaders, the daily’s editorial director Elsa…
Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists is deeply troubled by an intense crackdown on opposition and independent journalists who have been critical of public officials. In particular, we wish to call your attention to the cases of journalists Shakhin Agabeili, Eynulla Fatullayev, Fikret Faramazoglu, and Sakit Zakhidov. In a disturbing trend, several public officials have filed about a dozen politicized lawsuits against critical journalists in the past three months. Among the plaintiffs is Interior Minister Ramil Usubov who filed five defamation lawsuits against Agabeili, Fatullayev and Faramazoglu. We condemn this campaign of harassment of Azerbaijan’s independent press and call on you to do everything within your power to stop it.
New York, October 2, 2006—The Committee to Protect Journalists today condemned a ban on the Far Eastern Economic Review, which has been hit with a criminal defamation lawsuit by the Singapore leadership for an article about an opposition politician. The Ministry of Information, Communications and Arts revoked the Review’s distribution rights in Singapore on September…
New York, October 2, 2006—The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns a three-month ban by authorities in Gabon on the newspaper Les Echos du Nord for an article which criticized the handling of a territorial dispute with neighboring Equatorial Guinea. The National Council on Communications (CNC), an official regulatory body, imposed the ban on September 29,…