The media have become part and parcel of Thailand’s intensifying political conflict: Two privately held satellite television news stations are openly aligned with competing political street movements, and state-controlled outlets are under opposition fire for allegedly misrepresenting recent crucial news events.
On Tuesday, Human Rights First (HRF) released its assessment of the implementation of the Refugee Crisis in Iraq Act of 2008. CPJ supported the legislation, which created a category known as P2 (priority 2) for direct resettlement of Iraqi refugees with U.S. affiliations, including employees of U.S.-based media. The act promised a lifeline to Iraqi…
The government of the Republic of Congo reacted over the weekend to last week’s CPJ special report looking into the unsolved death of Franco-Congolese online journalist Bruno Jacquet Ossébi. We welcome the government’s interest in the case and take note that an official spokesman did not dispute our findings.
Iranian-American freelance journalist Roxana Saberi, left, who was sentenced to eight years in prison by an Iranian Revolutionary Court on charges of spying for the United States, remains on a hunger strike that she started a week ago. Her father, Reza Saberi, told Agence France-Presse after visiting her in Tehran’s Evin Prison on her 32 birthday…
In New York, the Tribeca Film Festival showed a strong documentary, The Fixer: The Taking of Ajmal Naqshbandi, on Sunday. After the screening, I moderated a panel that featured director Ian Olds and Naqeeb Sherzad, a close friend of Ajmal, shown at left. The panel also included U.S. journalists Christian Parenti, who helped produce the…
Jiang Weiping, a 2001 CPJ Press Feedom Award winner, spoke on Tuesday on a panel organized by the Ford Foundation in Washington, along with CPJ board member Clarence Page and Executive Director Joel Simon. The panel addressed the concerning number of journalists jailed worldwide–125, according to CPJ’s 2008 census–and discussed how advocacy by CPJ and other…
Thirty-five members of the International Freedom of Expression Exchange (IFEX) join CPJ and Reporters Without Borders in a letter to the head of Iran’s judiciary calling for the release of imprisoned journalist Roxana Saberi, currently held in Iran’s Evin Prison.
Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) leads a group of six senators to call for the immediate release of the former state Daily Observer newspaper, “Chief” Ebrima Manneh today. Colleagues at the newspaper say they witnessed two plainclothes Gambian National Intelligence Agency officers whisk Manneh, right, away in July 2006. He has not been seen since despite repeated calls…
The murderers of journalists around the globe presume they won’t get caught. Unfortunately, they’re often right: Only one case in 10 results in any convictions; just one in 20 results in convictions of those who ordered the murder. For more than a year it seemed like the August 2007 slaying of U.S. journalist Chauncey Bailey,…
On Tuesday, the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission convened a hearing on Sri Lanka. The impetus was the disintegrating human rights situation in the northeastern “no fire zone.” CPJ was invited to testify about attacks on Sri Lankan journalists and the fact that both sides to the Tamil secessionist war–the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and the government–do…