Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is deeply concerned about recent closures of independent media outlets in Ukraine. We believe that these closures are part of a sweeping campaign to eliminate voices that are critical of the government and to block public access to independent sources of information in the run-up to presidential elections scheduled for October.
New York, June 22, 2004—Ukraine’s prosecutor-general, Gennady Vasilev, announced yesterday that investigators are questioning a suspect who admitted to killing independent journalist Georgy Gongadze, local reports said. The citizen, identified only as K, is a convicted murderer already in prison for several other killings that involved decapitation, the manner in which Gongadze was killed four…
Your Excellency, The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) condemns yesterday’s deportation of Mikhail Podolyak, a Ukrainian journalist, by the Belarusian security service (KGB). Early yesterday morning, agents forced Podolyak out of his home in the capital of Minsk and put him on a train to Odessa, Ukraine, according to local and international reports.
New York, June 21, 2004—Tagib Abdusalamov, director of the Dagestani bureau of the Russian state radio and television company GTRK, was shot and wounded on Friday, June 18, by unknown assailants, according to local and international reports. Abdusalamov is in critical condition at the hospital in Dagestan’s capital, Makhachkala. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ)…
Baku, June 18, 2004—The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) today held a press conference in Azerbaijan’s capital, Baku, to call on Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev to end his government’s repression of independent and opposition media. In Baku, CPJ Executive Director Ann Cooper, Europe & Central Asia Program Coordinator Alex Lupis, and Senior Editor Amanda Watson-Boles…
New York, June 18, 2004—The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is concerned that authorities in the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic (NAR)—a mountainous enclave in southwest Azerbaijan—have harassed two journalists writing about politics, economics, and social issues, including local government corruption. Melakhet Nasibova, a correspondent for the Azerbaijani news agency Turan and the Azerbaijani Service of the…
Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), a New York-based independent organization dedicated to defending press freedom worldwide, is concerned that Uzbek authorities have failed to meet their commitment to review the case of Ruslan Sharipov, an independent journalist and human rights activist. He is currently serving a four-year prison sentence for sodomy and having sexual relations with minors.
New York, June 11, 2004—Yesterday the Moscow Military District Court again acquitted the six suspects in the October 1994 murder of Dmitry Kholodov, a popular journalist for the Moscow-based independent newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets. The trial is the second one in the case. On June 26, 2002, the same court fully acquitted the defendants—former intelligence officers…