New York, September 26, 2003—Police in Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, yesterday charged nine journalists from the Daily News with violating Section 83 of the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (AIPPA) by practicing journalism without accreditation. The journalists, who were summoned to the Harare central police station yesterday morning, were on a list of…
New York, September 22, 2003—Four directors of the Associated Newspapers of Zimbabwe (ANZ), the company that owns Zimbabwe’s only independent daily, the Daily News, were arrested today and charged with violating the repressive Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (AIPPA), according to ANZ Chief Executive Sam Sipepa Nkomo. Earlier today, Nkomo and three…
New York, September 19, 2003—Yesterday evening, police again occupied the offices of the Daily News and prevented journalists from putting out a Friday edition of the paper. The move was in defiance of a High Court ruling that same day allowing the newspaper to reopen and directing police to return confiscated equipment. Journalists at the…
New York, September 18, 2003—Zimbabwe’s High Court ruled today to allow the Daily News, the country’s only independent daily, to resume publishing after being closed for seven days. A High Court judge also ordered authorities to immediately return computers and other equipment confiscated by the police during a Tuesday, September 16, raid on the newspaper’s…
New York, September 16, 2003—This morning, detectives, security agents, armed paramilitary members, and riot police raided the offices of the Daily News, Zimbabwe’s only independent daily, according to The Associated Press (AP). Officials also seized computers and other equipment belonging to the newspaper. The raid came after the newspaper was closed on September 12. On…
New York, September 12, 2003—Zimbabwean authorities have shuttered the offices of the Harare-based Daily News, the country’s only independent daily. A Daily News staffer who answered the phone at the newspaper’s offices this evening said that “our operations are being ceased.” According to Agence France-Presse (AFP), a Daily News reporter said today that “about 20…
New York, August 21, 2003—Earlier this month, a group of young men brutally assaulted Flata Kavinga, a reporter for Zimbabwe’s English-language weekly The Midlands Observer. According to sources familiar with the incident, on August 8, six men—at least two of whom were members of Zimbabwe’s ruling ZANU-PF—approached the reporter outside a nightclub in Kwekwe, a…
Your Excellency, The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is outraged by your government’s continuing harassment of Andrew Meldrum, Zimbabwe correspondent for the U.K.-based Guardian newspaper. Immigration officials ordered him today to leave the country.