2020

As Belarus’s August 9, 2020, presidential election nears with President Aleksandr Lukashenko vying to remain in power after 26 years in office, press freedom advocates say Belarusian authorities are cracking down on journalists and government critics.  Over three days starting June 25, Belarusian authorities arrested several popular bloggers: Ihor Losik, Serhei Petrukhin, Aleksandr Kabanau, Volodimir…

Regina Reyes says she had a “journalist’s premonition” that something bad would happen the day before Philippine authorities ordered her ABS-CBN news station to cease and desist operations on May 5. That evening, ABS-CBN, the nation’s largest news organization, said goodbye to its viewing audience and signed off the air. “Up to now, that screen…

A new survey conducted by the Hong Kong Journalists Association (HKJA) and released June 19 showed that an overwhelming majority of journalists in Hong Kong worry about their personal safety if the new national security law is enacted. The legislation, approved by the National People’s Congress in Beijing, would criminalize any act of secession, subversion,…

Eszter Zalan is a correspondent for the Brussels-based EUobserver. She covered conflict and war zones for Népszabadság, the now-shuttered Hungarian daily, for several years, and covered Hungary for Agence France-Presse, before joining EUobserver in 2015. Recently, she has reported on EU affairs, including Brexit, Hungary, and the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. CPJ spoke with Zalan via…

Syria hasn’t been greatly impacted by the global COVID-19 pandemic. The Syrian Health Ministry has counted 123 cases, and six deaths as of June 1, according to a report by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). The country has begun to relax restrictions it imposed in mid-March, including curfews and…

Getty Images photographer John Moore has covered crises all over the world, from the U.S. border with Mexico to political unrest in Pakistan. But the COVID-19 pandemic has found him capturing devastation closer to home: in Stamford, Connecticut, where he lives, and in the hard-hit suburbs of New York City.

The Committee to Protect Journalists joined nine other human rights and press freedom groups yesterday in a statement calling on the Cameroonian government to allow for an independent probe into the death of journalist Samuel Wazizi. The statement calls for U.N. Security Council members to take advantage of a June 12 meeting with the U.N….

Yesterday, the Committee to Protect Journalists joined seven other human rights and free expression groups in writing a letter to European Union Trade Commissioner Phil Hogan, requesting that human rights provisions be included in draft EU legislation concerning the exports of technology products such as surveillance software, which could be used for both civilian and…

In the nearly 71 years of Communist Party rule in China, the country’s citizens have enjoyed brief periods of relatively free speech, as during the abortive Hundred Flowers Campaign in 1956-57, or the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, when investigative journalists covered local corruption and pollution. When the coronavirus outbreak first began spreading in…

Updated June 22, 2021 CPJ has documented numerous press freedom violations since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, from legislation threatening to censor free speech to arrests of journalists providing the public with vital news about the virus. This map plots violations, verified by CPJ staff, across nearly every region of the world from early…