While the Mexican press was able to report more freely about government corruption, an increase in criminal defamation charges and government pressure on journalists to reveal their sources cast a pall over the media in 2003. As President Vicente Fox hit the halfway point of his six-year presidency, his chances of transforming the country were…
The trial of six men accused of killing Mozambican journalist Carlos Cardoso in November 2000 ended on January 31. The defendants were sentenced to lengthy prison terms ranging from 23 to 28 years in jail for conspiring to kill Cardoso because of his aggressive coverage of a 1996 corruption scandal involving the state-controlled Commercial Bank…
There was hope for a peaceful resolution toe the political violence in Nepal on January 29, 2003, when the government and Maoist rebels signed a cease-fire agreement to halt their seven-year civil conflict. However, the deepening political crisis within the country’s constitutional monarchy and the eventual collapse of the cease-fire in August sparked a sharp…
After U.S. President George W. Bush claimed in his 2003 State of the Union address that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had attempted to buy uranium from the impoverished West African country of Niger, outraged journalists and President Mamadou Tandja, who has led the nation since its return to civilian rule in 1999, rallied to the…
In Nigeria’s first successful transfer between civilian administrations since independence in 1960, President Olusegun Obasanjo was re-elected in a landslide victory that also saw his ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP) make significant gains in polls across the country. Despite the relatively peaceful conduct of the election, opposition parties and election observers alleged widespread fraud, irregularities,…
North Korea’s goal in a global nuclear crisis put the country on the front page of international papers throughout 2003. But the regime’s absolute control over news and information ensured that the world continued to know little about what happened inside the country’s tightly fortified borders.
Although the press in Pakistan enjoyed greater freedom under its president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who took power in a military coup in 1999, journalists there still operate under pressure from the military, religious hard-liners, intelligence agencies, and the country’s antiquated blasphemy laws.
Panama is known for its institutionalized system of legal harassment against the press. Journalists there confront antiquated media laws that impose prison terms for defamation, criminalize criticism of public officials, and permit prior censorship. In July, Eduardo Bertoni, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights’ special rapporteur for freedom of expression, visited Panama and recommended that…
The overwhelming issue facing the Philippine press in 2003 was the increasing number of journalists murdered with impunity. In the last year alone, at least five journalists were slain in the course of their work–a toll surpassed only by war-related killings of journalists in Iraq. But in the Philippines, this violence is not a temporary…
Nine years after the 1994 genocide, which killed about 800,000 people, Rwanda ended its transitional ruling period with a constitutional referendum, followed by the first presidential and multiparty parliamentary elections in the country since its independence in 1962. The transitional government’s control of the broadcast media and its repressive tactics against the independent press helped…