By Ann CooperAs a foreign correspondent covering the Soviet Union a decade ago, I was an eyewitness to a dramatic example of the press’ critical role in building democracy. Granted a bit of freedom by Mikhail Gorbachev’s mid-1980s glasnost policy, long-suppressed Soviet journalists set their own daring agenda: they probed forbidden history, investigated contemporary corruption,…
By Kavita Menon and A. Lin NeumannMuch of Asia remained hostile to a free, independent media, despite the growing consensus that Asian political and economic stability depends in great measure on governments’ willingness to improve transparency and lift restrictions on the press. In China, Burma, Vietnam, and even Malaysia, government suppression of the media is…
Former Prime Minister Muhammad Nawaz Sharif’s efforts to muzzle the press, and bring the legislative, judicial, and executive branches of government under his personal control, earned him the reputation of a tyrant and badly discredited Pakistan’s democracy. His slide toward authoritarianism ended abruptly with a bloodless coup on October 12, in which army chief Gen.…
Since its founding in 1981, CPJ has, as a matter of strategy and policy, concentrated on press freedom violations and attacks on journalists outside the United States. CPJ aims to devote its efforts to those countries where journalists are most in need of international support and protection. As a result, we do not systematically monitor…
Your Honor: The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is dismayed by your decision to censor media coverage of the trial of former Prime Minister Muhammad Nawaz Sharif. In an order delivered on February 25 in response to a petition filed by the prosecution, you reportedly said that any statements made by the defendants must be recorded by the court, which “will decide at the appropriate stage as to whether the same or part of it should not be released to the public or media.”
Click here for the complete text of the report. New York, Feb. 14, 2000—When the democratically elected leader of Pakistan, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, was deposed last October by a military coup, few independent journalists regretted his sudden departure. Now, in a special report released today, the Committee to Protect Journalists details the brutal tactics…