ALTHOUGH PRESIDENT CLINTON RECEIVED STAR TREATMENT during his historic visit to Vietnam in November, little news of the trip was allowed into the country’s state-owned press. Huge crowds greeted the first U.S. president to tour the country since the Vietnam War. Speaking in Ho Chi Minh City, Clinton urged the Vietnamese government to allow more…
EIGHTY-ONE JOURNALISTS WERE IN PRISON AROUND THE WORLD at the end of 2000, jailed for practicing their profession. The number is down slightly from the previous year, when 87 were in jail, and represents a significant decline from 1998, when 118 journalists were imprisoned. While jailing journalists can be an effective means of stifling bad…
Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) strongly protests the house arrest of writer Dr. Nguyen Xuan Tu, better known by his pen name Dr. Ha Sy Phu. We call on the Vietnamese government to restore Dr. Ha’s liberty and abandon legal actions currently pending against him.
Click here to read more about press freedom conditions in VIETNAM. New York, April 14, 2000 — Journalist Sylvaine Pasquier, a reporter for the French weekly magazine L’Express, was expelled from Vietnam by local authorities, who put her on an April 14 commercial flight to Bangkok. Pasquier, a French citizen, was reporting in southern Ho…
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…
Hunkering down to defend the Communist Party as the country’s sole voice of political power, Vietnam’s Politburo continues to bar virtually all attempts at free expression that violate the guidelines of the party leadership. Vietnam’s National Assembly amended and tightened an already repressive press law in June, centralizing media control–including the Internet–within the Ministry of…
“When the bombs began falling in Yugoslavia on March 24, the seven Serb journalists who happened to be visiting our offices in New York during a tour of the United States all ran for the phones. They were worried about the families they had left behind, but they also feared for the survival of Serbia’s…
Washington, D.C., March 25 — The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reported today in its annual worldwide study of press freedom that at least 118 journalists were in prison in 25 countries at the end of 1998, and 24 journalists in 17 countries were murdered during the year in reprisal for their reporting.
“Investigative reporter Alejandra Matus spent six years researching The Black Book of Chilean Justice. But her book, a historical exposé of the judiciary’s lack of independence, spent less than two days on Chilean bookshelves: On April 14, police confiscated its entire press run at the order of a Santiago Appeals Court judge. That same day,…