Press Freedom News and Views
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Turkey Crackdown Chronicle: Week of September 10, 2018
September 13, 2018 2:07 PM ET
Turkey detains Austrian writer Austrian citizen Max Zirngast, a contributor to several magazines and a student of political science, according to the OSCE, was detained by anti-terrorism police in Ankara, Turkey's capital, on September 11, Deutsche Welle reported. Deutsche Welle quoted a tweet of German magazine re:volt--one of his...
CPJ joins call for Sweden to uphold human rights in EU regulation on surveillance equipment exports
September 13, 2018 11:23 AM ET
The Committee to Protect Journalists wrote to Annika Ben David, Sweden's ambassador-at-large for human rights, as part of a coalition of eight other civil society organizations....
Undiscoverable: How Al-Jazeera's Snapchat channel disappeared from three Gulf nations
September 10, 2018 12:35 PM ET
Search for "Al-Jazeera" on Snapchat, and the first result that comes up is a ubiquitous publisher channel in the app's famed vertical layout. That is, unless you are in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), or Bahrain. Users in these counties are instead offered a list of stores...
Journalists in Yemen under attack from all sides as rival forces crack down on critics
September 7, 2018 12:11 PM ET
In its report released late last month, the U.N. Human Rights Council found that all groups involved in the Yemen conflict--from the government-controlled south, with its militias propped up by the UAE-led coalition and loyal to the secessionist Southern Transitional Council, and areas held by the rebel Ansar Allah...
Turkey Crackdown Chronicle: Week of September 3, 2018
September 6, 2018 2:58 PM ET
Journalists in court The prosecutor in the trial of imprisoned journalist Nazlı Ilıcak, who is charged with "revealing information regarding state security that is supposed to be secret for espionage proposes," asked the 26th Istanbul Court of Serious Crimes for a life sentence, the daily Evrensel reported on September...
Turkey Crackdown Chronicle: Week of August 27, 2018
August 30, 2018 3:18 PM ET
Police assault reporters in Istanbul Turkish police violently attacked several reporters trying to cover a weekly silent protest, known as the Saturday Mothers, in Istanbul's Galatasaray Square on August 25, the New York Times reported. The reporters, alongside activists participating in the protest, were attacked by the police during...
CPJ joins call for UN Human Rights Council to address crackdown in Tanzania
August 17, 2018 4:22 PM ET
The Committee to Protect Journalists and 29 other civil society groups yesterday wrote to the member and observer states of the United Nations Human Rights Council urging them to address the deteriorating situation for human rights, including freedom of the press, in Tanzania during the upcoming 39th session of...
Google complicity in Chinese censorship could endanger press freedom elsewhere
August 17, 2018 1:45 PM ET
In 2010, after four years of offering Chinese users a heavily censored version of its search engine, Google decided it would no longer block search results at the request of the Chinese state. "Our objection is to those forces of totalitarianism," Sergey Brin, Google's co-founder, told The New York...
Turkey Crackdown Chronicle: Week of August 13, 2018
August 16, 2018 5:45 PM ET
Capital Markets Board issues warning on coverage of financial markets The Turkish Capital Markets Board (SPK) said in a statement that Article 107 of the Law no. 6362 on "market fraud" will be used against those who "spread fabricated, false and fallacious news about the economy," independent news website...