UPDATE: July 5, 2006 Original Alert: April 4, 2006 Ko Thar Cho, freelance Ko Kyaw Thwin, Dhamah Yate LEGAL ACTION On June 21, a court in the central town of Yamaethin upheld the three-year prison sentences for journalists Ko Thar Cho and Ko Kyaw Thwin, who were first charged on March 27 for photographing and…
Could you pick out Equatorial Guinea on the world map? Or Turkmenistan, or Eritrea? Probably not at the first attempt. These countries are usually below the radar of the international media, and the autocrats who run them like it that way. It helps them crush press freedoms and keep their population in the dark. That is why the Committee to Protect Journalists, a New York-based press freedom group, has drawn up a league table of the world’s 10 most censored countries. We hope that the list, issued on World Press Freedom Day, will shine a light into the dark corners of the world where governments and their political cronies decide what people will read, see, and hear.
New York, April 4, 2006—The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns the arrest and summary trial of two journalists accused of filming the countryside from a public bus outside Burma’s controversial new capital. Ko Thar Cho, a photojournalist, and Ko Kyaw Thwin, a columnist at the Burmese-language magazine Dhamah Yate, were arrested on March 27 while…
New York, February 28, 2006—The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns harassment and death threats by Burmese security officials against Maung Maung Kyaw Win, a senior reporter and editor at the Burmese-language Myanmar Dana economics magazine. The threats have prompted the journalist to flee the country, and he is now seeking political asylum. Maung Maung Kyaw…
AFGHANISTAN: 1 Ali Mohaqqiq Nasab, Haqooq-i-Zan (Women’s Rights) Imprisoned: October 1, 2005 The attorney general ordered editor Nasab’s arrest on blasphemy charges after the religious adviser to President Hamid Karzai, Mohaiuddin Baluch, filed a complaint about his magazine. “I took the two magazines and spoke to the Supreme Court chief, who wrote to the attorney…
BURMA International pressure goaded Burma’s ruling military junta into releasing several journalists and hundreds of political prisoners in 2005. But five journalists were among the more than 1,300 remaining detainees, and Nobel Peace Prize–winner Aung San Suu Kyi was still under house arrest. On January 3, the junta released journalists Thein Tan and Ohn Kyaing,…