New York, April 27, 2006—The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns authorities in Belarus for preventing local and foreign journalists from covering an opposition rally in the capital Minsk on Wednesday to mark the 20th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Police in the eastern city of Bobruisk detained journalists Nikita Bytsenko and Yuri Svetlakov of…
New York, April 26, 2006—The Committee to Protect Journalists is alarmed by the vicious beating by 10 unidentified assailants of a journalist from a suspended opposition newspaper in Kazakhstan. Kenzhegali Aitbakiyev of Aina Plyus was beaten unconscious as he was walking in the financial capital, Almaty, late Sunday, local and international press reported. Aitbakiyev, who…
New York, April 26, 2006—Belarusian authorities in the capital, Minsk, and at the Poland-Belarus border crossing Kuznica Bialostocka-Bruzgi denied entry to two crews from the Polish public television channel Telewizja Polska on Tuesday, the broadcaster reported. Both crews were headed to Minsk to cover opposition rallies marking the 20th anniversary of the April 1986 nuclear…
Hu Jintao and Bill Gates will have had a lot to talk about Tuesday, when the Chinese president visited Microsoft’s Redmond campus. With the mainstream Chinese media heavily censored, the Internet has become a vital outlet for independent journalism, critical writing and information. The authorities are ruthless in their suppression of criticism of their rule in any medium. China has jailed more writers and journalists than any other country, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
New York, April 19, 2006—The Committee to Protect Journalists today condemned an attempt by authorities in the Belarusian capital Minsk to close the weekly Nasha Niva, one of the country’s last independent newspapers. Local and international media reported that city officials informed Editor-in-chief Andrei Dynko that they did not want his paper based in Minsk…
Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists, an independent, nonpartisan organization dedicated to defending the rights of journalists worldwide, is deeply concerned about the fate of Mario Spezi, a veteran crime journalist imprisoned in the central Italian city of Perugia.
New York, April 17, 2006—Journalist Ilyas Aktas died on April 14 in an Ankara hospital two weeks after he was shot in the head during protests in the predominantly Kurdish city of Diyarbakir, in southeast Turkey, local and international media reported. The Committee to Protect Journalists is deeply troubled by the shooting and is still…
New York, April 17, 2006—The Committee to Protect Journalists expressed solidarity today with the more than 1000 Russian journalists and activists who protested the Kremlin’s control of television news reporting. The demonstrators rallied in downtown Moscow Sunday to mark the fifth anniversary of the hostile takeover by state gas monopoly Gazprom of the leading independent…
New York, April 14, 2006—Prosecutors in the western city of Kaliningrad have filed criminal libel charges against Arseny Makhlov, publisher of the weekly Dvornik, the Moscow-based news agency Regnum reported today. The charges relate to three articles in Dvornik during 2004 and 2005 which criticized a local prosecutor for accepting money to close a fraud…