John Emerson

WHILE CAMBODIA ENJOYS A SUBSTANTIALLY FREE PRINT MEDIA, local journalism continues to suffer from bitter political divisions and frequent clashes with government authorities. Press freedom is guaranteed by the Constitution, and the Khmer-language press is famous for taking dramatic liberties in print, often engaging in name-calling and attacks on various political leaders. Speaking to a…

NOVEMBER 4 MARKED PRESIDENT PAUL BIYA’S 18TH YEAR as leader of a regime that has persistently been accused of human rights violations. Cameroonian law enforcement officials make “widespread and systematic” use of torture, according to a March report by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. The pompous anniversary celebrations failed to impress Cameroonian journalists,…

PRESS FREEDOM IS GENERALLY RESPECTED IN CANADA, and CPJ does not routinely monitor press conditions in the country. However, CPJ was greatly alarmed by the September 13 shooting of Michel Auger, a veteran crime reporter with the French-language daily Le Journal de Montréal, and sent a letter to Florent Gagné, general director of the Quebec…

ALL YEAR, FIGHTING RAGED BETWEEN GOVERNMENT TROOPS and the rebel Movement for Democracy and Justice (MDJT) in the mountainous Tibesti region. But because of restrictions on the press, there was little news from the battlefront. International reporters were barred from Tibesti all year, according to the BBC. Chad’s independent media, clustered in the southern capital…

THE CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION OF FORMER DICTATOR GEN. AUGUSTO PINOCHET and other military officers severely tested the independence of the Chilean judiciary at a time when the courts were being used to harass journalists investigating official corruption. After narrowly defeating rightist candidate Joaquín Lavín in a January 16 run-off election, Ricardo Lagos took office on March…

PENDING MEMBERSHIP IN THE WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION and fledgling steps towards greater dialogue with Taiwan are just two recent signs that China is opening up to the world, a trend that some say will lead to greater freedoms within the country. The ruling Communist Party, however, has yet to extend this opening to the news…

IN A DEVASTATING YEAR FOR COLOMBIA, journalists were murdered, assaulted, threatened, and kidnapped. Many fled into exile. With the peace process that began in 1999 largely moribund, a nearly four-decade conflict that pits two major leftist guerrilla groups against the army and right-wing paramilitary forces continued to escalate throughout the year. All the warring factions…

INSTABILITY PLAGUED THE THREE-ISLAND ISLAMIC REPUBLIC after the military government of Col. Azali Assoumani tried unsuccessfully to reintegrate the island of Anjouan, which had seceded from the federation in 1997. There were several attacks on journalists after a January referendum in which Anjouan rejected a settlement brokered by the Organization of African Unity (OAU). Violent…

EVEN AS COSTA RICAN JOURNALISTS BATTLED A FLURRY of defamation lawsuits, a proposed bill that would have greatly enhanced press freedom in the country failed to win legislative approval. On February 15, the Legislative Assembly’s judiciary committee rejected a bill, drafted by several leading journalists and endorsed by President Miguel Angel Rodríguez, that would have…

FOLLOWING THE DEATH OF PRESIDENT FRANJO TUDJMAN in December 1999, the advent of a reformist government brought a better year for the Croatian press. An opposition alliance defeated the late president’s nationalist HDZ party in January 2-3 parliamentary elections and in two rounds of presidential voting over the next five weeks. During the parliamentary election…