Nina Ognianova/Europe & Central Asia Program Coordinator

Nina Ognianova is coordinator of CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia Program. A native of Bulgaria, Ognianova has carried out numerous fact-finding and advocacy missions across the region. Her commentaries on press freedom have appeared in the Guardian, the International Herald Tribune, the Huffington Post, and the EU Observer, among others. Follow her on Twitter @Kremlinologist1

CPJ was turned away from visiting journalist Ramazan Yesergepov in this prison colony in Taraz, Kazakhstan. (Nina Ognianova/CPJ)

Denied access, CPJ manages to interview Kazakh prisoner

On June 3, I took a six-hour-long drive from Almaty to Taraz with local press freedom advocate Rozlana Taukina and two family members of imprisoned editor Ramazan Yesergepov to visit him. Yesergepov has been a long-term case for CPJ. In November 2008, he published two internal Kazakh security service (KNB) memos in his now-defunct newspaper, Alma-Ata Info, which…

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Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko, left, and Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev at a November economic conference. (AP/Sergei Grits)

In bad company: Kazakhstan takes page from Belarus

Belarus has been termed Europe’s last dictatorship because of its long intolerance of dissent and press freedom. So accustomed is the world to the clampdowns of President Aleksandr Lukashenko’s regime that neither a recently issued decree on Internet access, which requires that providers record users’ personal data, nor last week’s police raids at a number…

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Mikhail Beketov before he was brutally beaten and left for dead in 2008. (Eco Oborona)

Beketov still recovering from attack a year later in Russia

Those familiar with Mikhail Beketov’s ordeal describe his survival as nothing short of a miracle. The once fit, towering 51-year-old who campaigned on environmental issues and criticized his city government’s policies through the pages of his newspaper is now gone. But the former editor of Khimkinskaya Pravda, an independent publication that exposed the blunders of the Khimki…

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CPJ

Russia, EU tell CPJ they will act on Russian murders

On September 15, a CPJ delegation released a special report in Moscow on impunity in journalist killings committed in Russia under the country’s current leadership. The report, Anatomy of Injustice, garnered an unusual amount of attention from the Russian media. Our press conference at the Independent Press Center was packed with journalists, both domestic and…

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Politkovskaya case: 2 trials, 1 court, many questions

About 10 reporters sit on one of two wooden benches in the back of Room No. 4 at the Moscow District Military Court in Moscow. They’re gathered for the trial of three defendants accused of playing a role in the October 2006 murder of Novaya Gazeta special correspondent Anna Politkovskaya. Only they won’t be attending…

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