2008

New York, October 17, 2008–The director and a staff member of the Society for Democratic Initiatives (SDI), a Sierra Leone media advocacy group, say they are receiving death threats after publishing a report on press conditions late last month.

New York, October 17, 2008–The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns the detention in western China of a filmmaker and his assistant, who have been held for nearly seven months after taping interviews with Tibetan residents about their lives under Chinese government rule. 

Dear Mr. President: The Committee to Protect Journalists believes the criminal investigation of prominent journalist Carlos Fernando Chamorro Barrios is politically motivated and intended to restrict critical news coverage in Nicaragua. The case undermines your government’s oft-stated commitment to press freedom.

We issued the following statement today after news reports from Beijing announced that China has decided to extend the relaxation of rules governing foreign journalists. The rules had been eased in January 2007, as part of China’s pledge to allow reporters unrestricted coverage of the Olympic Games.”The reports that China has agreed to extend the…

The jailing of Vietnamese journalist Nguyen Viet Chien continues to be in the news today with the legal Web site Jurist and the South Korean-based news site Digital Chosun both running stories about the two-year sentence the journalist has received.

New York, October 16, 2008–Nigerian journalist Eiphraim Audu was shot by six unknown gunmen near his home on Wednesday in Lafia, central Nigeria, local journalists and the Nigerian Union of Journalists told CPJ.

China’s decision to extend or end the eased restrictions on foreign journalists it put in place for the Olympics is almost a moot point. The decision is expected to be announced tomorrow, and in the past, officials have suggested the new rules will be extended. But a change in the rules will be largely irrelevant…

Coverage of the arrest and jailing of Nguyen Viet Chien, a journalist with daily Thanh Nien, for breaking news on a state corruption scandal is making news today. Taiwan’s The Straits Times is running the Agence France-Presse wire story on the incident, and Radio Australia has a short news item about the jailing on their Web site today. Both…

New York, October 15, 2008–The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns an Egyptian court’s decision on Saturday to levy steep fines against an editor and reporter for an independent weekly that published a satirical piece about a prominent cleric.

New York, October 15, 2008–Nguyen Viet Chien, a reporter for the Vietnamese daily newspaper Thanh Nien who broke major stories on high-level government corruption in 2006, was sentenced today to two years in prison after being found guilty of “abusing democratic freedoms to infringe upon the interests of the state,” according to news reports.