CPJ’s statement follows an exchange documented in video footage and media reports between journalist Ambrozia Meta and Prime Minister Edi Rama at a March 19 press conference in the capital of Tirana. Meta, a reporter for the privately owned news channel Syri TV, told CPJ that the prime minister had made her feel “bad” and “intimidated” when he touched her cheek as he left the conference. “I reacted instinctively, asking him not to touch me again,” she said.
Meta had asked Rama about a controversial luxury tourism investment project in the environmentally protected area of the Albanian island of Sazan, which is reportedly linked to Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of former U.S. President Donald Trump. The Balkans media advocacy group safejournalists.net described the incident as “part of a concerning pattern where Prime Minister Rama has exhibited contempt towards journalists, particularly women, who pose challenging inquiries.”
Meta told CPJ that during the press conference she asked several questions about the project, which Rama did not answer and instead called her “arguments ignorant” and said she was “a journalist without ethics, without politeness.” The reporter told CPJ that “Rama’s behavior with journalists is arrogant, shows a lack of respect” and that the incident weighs on her mentally, making her feel belittled. She added that she hadn’t expected the public reaction from the incident or that Rama would continue his verbal attacks against her.
Rama refused calls to apologize, saying the video recording was “misinterpreted.” He described his hand movement as “a completely innocent gesture” and only “a friendly pat on the shoulder following a normal conversation with the press where all questions were answered” in two posts on X, formerly known as Twitter. CPJ’s emailed questions to Rama’s press department received no reply.
“We are appalled by Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama’s intimidating behavior against reporter Ambrozia Meta and condemn the action as part of a wider trend of Albanian officials’ using abusive language and intimidating behavior against journalists asking critical questions,” said Attila Mong, CPJ’s Europe representative. “Albanian politicians and public officials, including Rama, must know that actions like this can undermine press freedom and legitimize further acts of aggression against the press.”
In March 2022, Rama told Meta during a press conference that she needed “re-education” and barred her from his press conferences for 60 days after she asked questions about alleged corruption involving Socialist Party politicians.
In July 2022, Rama reportedly told Klevin Muka, a reporter with private news channel A2 CNN TV, that he behaved unethically, needed to be sent for “re-education,” and banned him from attending government press conferences for three months after he asked critical questions, according to safejournalists.net.
Albanian public officials, including Rama, have been documented regularly using language that belittles critical journalists, according to a report following a 2019 joint press freedom mission with CPJ and six other international press freedom organizations.
]]>With Europe due to vote from June 6 to 9, the 39 groups also called on the new European Commission to prioritize implementation of their recommendations.
Read more about press freedom in the European Union in CPJ’s special report “Fragile Progress,” which called on the European Commission to strengthen the rule of law report with a view to building trust with journalists and protecting media freedom.
Read the full joint statement below.
]]>“CPJ strongly condemns the three-month extension of Evan Gershkovich’s detention, just days before the one-year anniversary of his arrest on fabricated charges. Today’s ruling is yet another cynical affront to press freedom by the Russian authorities,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator. “Russian authorities must immediately release Gershkovich, drop all charges against him, and stop prosecuting reporters for their work.”
The Moscow court’s decision to approve the Federal Security Service’s (FSB) request marks the fifth extension of The Wall Street Journal reporter’s detention since his arrest on March 29, 2023, on espionage charges. Tuesday’s session was closed to the media.
Gershkovich faces up to 20 years in prison, according to the Russian criminal code, and is the first American journalist to face such accusations by Russia since the end of the Cold War. Gershkovich, The Wall Street Journal, and the U.S. government have all denied the espionage allegations.
“It’s a ruling that ensures Evan will sit in a Russian prison well past one year. It was also Evan’s 12th court appearance, baseless proceedings that falsely portray him as something other than what he is—a journalist who was doing his job,” The Wall Street Journal said in a statement.
The U.S. ambassador to Russia, Lynne Tracy, called the ruling “particularly painful,” as Friday will mark the journalist’s one-year detention.
“As we cross the one-year mark, the Russian government has yet to present any evidence to substantiate its accusations, no justification for Evan’s continued detention, and no explanation as to why Evan doing his job as a journalist constituted a crime,” Tracy said.
On April 11, 2023, the U.S. State Department designated Gershkovich as “wrongfully detained,” which unlocked a broad government effort to free him.
Russia was the world’s fourth worst jailer of journalists with at least 22, including Gershkovich and Alsu Kurmasheva, a U.S.-Russian journalist, behind bars when CPJ conducted its most recent annual prison census on December 1, 2023.
]]>According to the court’s decision, the U.S. government has three weeks to give assurances that Assange will be able to rely on First Amendment rights of the U.S. Constitution and to confirm whether he would be subjected to the death penalty. If the U.S. fails to provide proper assurances, Assange will be granted permission to appeal his extradition.
The next hearing is scheduled for May 20. The U.S. assurances must be filed by April 16, according to the court documents.
“We are glad that the extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the United States will be delayed,” said CPJ CEO Jodie Ginsberg, in New York. “His prosecution in the U.S. under the Espionage Act would have disastrous implications for press freedom. It is time that the U.S. Justice Department put an end to all these court proceedings and dropped its dogged pursuit of the WikiLeaks founder.”
In 2019, U.S. prosecutors indicted Assange on 17 criminal charges under the Espionage Act and a separate charge under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) in connection to WikiLeaks’ publication of thousands of leaked military and diplomatic documents. Assange’s lawyers have said that Assange faces up to 175 years in prison although U.S. prosecutors have said the sentence would be much shorter.
In 2021, the U.K. High Court ruled that Assange should be extradited, and that decision was approved by the government in June 2022.
Assange’s legal team separately submitted an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights in December 2022 and launched a case against Britain at the ECHR, seeking to stave off his extradition to the U.S. should he exhaust his appeals in U.K. courts.
The Wall Street Journal reported on March 20 that the Justice Department is considering whether to allow a plea deal for Assange, in which the Wikileaks founder would plead guilty to a reduced charge of mishandling classified information. However, the article noted, the discussions remain in flux.
Assange has been held in the U.K.’s Belmarsh prison since Ecuadoran officials revoked his asylum status in their London embassy, allowing British police in to arrest him on April 11, 2019.
]]>“It took three days for the Belarusian authorities to send Ihar Karnei to prison for three years: a typical example of the expediency and arbitrariness of the sentences handed down to independent journalists in the country,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator. “Belarusian authorities must immediately drop all charges against Karnei and release him, along with all other jailed journalists.”
CPJ was unable to immediately determine whether Karnei planned to appeal his sentence.
Karnei’s trial opened on Tuesday in the capital, Minsk, and he was found guilty on Friday, according to the banned human rights group Viasna and the Belarusian Association of Journalists (BAJ), an advocacy and trade group operating from exile, which called for his immediate release.
The state-owned newspaper Belarus Segodnya said that Karnei had collaborated with the BAJ, which was the largest independent media association in Belarus until it was dissolved in 2021 and labeled an extremist group in 2023. The indictment said that Karnei wrote “negative materials insulting the head of state” and others and gave “a false picture” of Belarus, the newspaper added.
Karnei has been in pre-trial detention since he was arrested on unknown charges in July, when authorities also searched his home and seized computers and phones.
Belarus has seen an unprecedented media crackdown since the 2020 election, which gave President Alexander Lukashenko, who has been in power since 1994, a sixth term. The vote was widely rejected as fraudulent, leading to huge protests followed by mass arrests.
Belarus was the world’s third-worst jailer of journalists in CPJ’s 2023 prison census, with at least 28 journalists, including Karnei, behind bars on December 1.
]]>On Wednesday, a court in the Russian capital, Moscow, gave Kuznetsov, a reporter with the independent news website RusNews who has been in detention since September 2021, a suspended sentence, rather than the four-and-a-half-year prison sentence that prosecutors had requested, according to media reports and his outlet.
But the journalist will remain behind bars because he is also being tried for allegedly inciting mass disturbances in group chats on Telegram, for which a prosecutor in December requested a nine-year jail sentence, those sources said.
“Russian authorities have held journalist Igor Kuznetsov for over two-and-a-half-years on a range of spurious charges aimed at silencing him and his outlet. Correspondents of RusNews are some of the last remaining independent reporters in President Vladimir Putin’s Russia,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator. “Authorities should drop all the charges against Kuznetsov, release him immediately, and stop jailing independent voices.”
The court also banned Kuznetsov from managing websites, working in media, and organizing mass and public events for four years, and sentenced him to one year of restricted freedom, those sources said.
Restriction of freedom involves not being allowed to leave home at certain times of day, not visiting certain places, not participating in certain activities, not leaving the territory of a specific municipality, and not changing your place of residence.
Russian authorities accused Kuznetsov of being connected to the Left Resistance, an anti-war movement created in 2017, which authorities have labeled as extremist. RusNews chief editor Sergey Aynbinder told CPJ that Kuznetsov denied being an “extremist.”
In addition to Kuznetsov, Russia has jailed two other RusNews journalists.
Maria Ponomarenko was given a six-year sentence in 2023 for spreading “fake” information about the Russian army and could face an additional five years in jail in a second criminal case where she is being tried on allegations of using violence against prison staff.
In March, Roman Ivanov was sentenced to seven years in jail on the same charge of spreading fake information about the army.
Russia was the world’s fourth worst jailer of journalists—with 22 behind bars, including Kuznetsov, Ponomarenko, and Ivanov—on December 1, 2023, when CPJ conducted its latest annual prison census.
CPJ’s email to Moscow’s Meshchansky District Court requesting comment on Kuznetsov’s sentence did not receive any response.
Editor’s note: The spelling of the Meshchansky District Court has been corrected in the last paragraph.
On Wednesday, Spanish daily newspaper El Mundo reported that Russian authorities refused to renew Colás’ visa, the outlet’s longtime correspondent in Moscow, and gave him 24 hours to leave Russia after working in the country for 12 years.
“The hasty and unceremonious treatment Spanish journalist Xavier Colás received when being expelled from Russia demonstrates how keen the Russian authorities are to silence independent reporting,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator. “Russian authorities should renew Colás’ visa and let him return and work in the country unless they are afraid of journalists.”
According to the outlet, late on Tuesday, March 19, a Russian official told Colás when he went to collect his visa that he would “have problems” if he did not leave before his visa expired. The journalist left Russia the next day, according to media reports.
“It’s hard to suddenly put 12 years of your life in three suitcases overnight and close the door knowing that that apartment will also be forbidden territory for you the next day,” Colás told El Mundo.
In a Twitter post, Colás wrote that the refusal to renew his visa happened “at the last minute.”
He added, “I don’t regret anything. I have simply done my job: I have told what is happening, I have talked to the people who are suffering because of it, and I have explained who is responsible for what is happening.”
Colás, who recently reported on presidential elections in Russia, has also been covering the war in Ukraine. In February, he published Putinistan, a book critical of Putin’s regime.
“The refusal to renew a journalist’s visa is one of the usual tools used by certain regimes to harm freedom of expression and prevent international coverage with autocracies such as Vladimir Putin’s, obsessed with controlling information,” El Mundo said, adding that Colás had remained in Moscow “to date” and “despite the regime’s hostility toward independent journalism.”
Russia tightened visa and accreditation rules for foreign correspondents after its February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, with renewals required every three months, rather than once a year as previously required, according to mediareports.
Russia has a history of expelling foreign reporters, including The Guardian’s Luke Harding in 2011 and the BBC’s Sarah Rainsford and Tom Vennink of the Dutch daily de Volkskrant in 2021. Since the start of Ukraine’s full-scale invasion, Russian authorities have failed to renew the visas and accreditations of Finnish journalists Arja Paananen and Anna-Lena Laurén, and of Dutch journalist Eva Hartog.
In March 2023, The Wall Street Journal’s Evan Gershkovich was arrested on espionage charges, the first American journalist to face such accusations by Russia since the end of the Cold War. Russia has also detained Alsu Kurmasheva, a U.S-Russian dual citizen and an editor with the Tatar-Bashkir service of U.S. Congress-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) since October 2023 on charges of failing to register as a foreign agent and of spreading “fake” information about the Russian army.
CPJ emailed the Russian Foreign Ministry for comment but did not receive any reply.
]]>“The 2.5 year prison sentence handed to journalist Andrei Tolchyn on unfounded charges is yet another demonstration of Belarusian authorities’ vindictiveness toward current and former members of the press—like Tolchyn—for their independent coverage of the country’s 2020 mass protests,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator. “Belarusian authorities must immediately drop all charges against Tolchyn and release him, along with all other jailed journalists.”
A court in the southeastern city of Homel convicted Tolchyn of facilitating extremist activity and defaming the president, according to the banned human rights group Viasna and Belarusian Association of Journalists (BAJ), an advocacy and trade group operating from exile.
His trial began on March 5, and he has been detained since September 2023, when authorities searched his home and seized his equipment, including a laptop. Authorities have detained Tolchyn multiple times and fined him in connection to his work and coverage of the 2020 protests demanding Lukashenko’s resignation. Tolchyn left journalism in 2020.
CPJ was not immediately able to confirm whether the charges were connected to his 2020 reporting or if Tolchyn plans to appeal.
Belarus was the world’s third-worst jailer of journalists in CPJ’s 2023 prison census, with at least 28 journalists, including Tolchyn, behind bars on December 1.
]]>On March 12, Ayuso’s chief of staff, Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, sent a series of texts via messaging app to Esther Palomera, deputy editor of elDiario.es, one of which said, “We are going to crush you. You’re going to have to close … Idiots.”
When Palomera asked if the message was a threat, Rodríguez responded, “It’s an announcement,” according to news reports, and the website’s director and founder, Ignacio Escolar, who told CPJ via email that elDiario.es was investigating possible legal remedies.
Escolar said in an opinion piece that the messages were sent “to intimidate and silence us” hours after elDiario.es published two articles about a criminal investigation into alleged tax fraud by Alberto González Amador, Ayuso’s partner.
In addition, the Community of Madrid, which Ayuso heads, sent a statement on Tuesday to a WhatsApp group of journalists accusing two El Pais journalists—whose names and photographs were included—of harassing Amador and Ayuso’s neighbors while reporting at the couple’s house, El Pais reported. The statement also accused “hooded journalists” from elDiario.es of trying to access the house. Rodríguez acknowledged that he was the one behind the personal data leak, also known as doxxing, and the allegations, which the two media outlets rejected as false.
“Spanish authorities should immediately and transparently investigate the threats and false allegations made against the news website elDiario.es and its journalists and the doxxing of two El Pais reporters and ensure that justice is served,” said Attila Mong, CPJ’s Europe representative. “Public officials should applaud media outlets that expose allegations of criminal behavior by politicians, rather than demonize and threaten journalists for doing their job.”
After the publication of elDiario.es’ investigation, subsequent media reports revealed that Amador had offered in February to pay the tax arrears but the prosecutor’s office did not accept his proposal, and on March 5 filed a complaint to an investigative court requesting that it charge Amador and four other businessmen with the falsification of invoices to evade tax.
In a March 18 video, Ayuso—who was not accused of any wrongdoing—defended her chief of staff and said the exchange between Rodríguez and Palomera was a conversation between “two people with a relationship of trust who argue on WhatsApp.”
For his part, Rodríguez told El País that the text messages published by elDiario.es were authentic and he regretted that a “fight with a friend” had left the “private and individual” sphere, but the exchange was “an angry way” of saying that elDiario.es was “inventing a case where there was none.”
Palomera responded with an opinion piece saying that it was not a “quarrel between friends” as their relationship had been “strictly professional, occasional and the usual one between a politician and journalist.”
In a text message responding to CPJ’s questions, Rodriguez said that he had never threatened the journalists. “If you see threats here, it is your personal opinion. There have never been any threats,” he said.
CPJ’s emails requesting comment to the press office of Madrid’s regional president and to the law firm Garrido, which represents Amador, did not receive any replies.
]]>On Monday, a court sentenced Kustov, chief editor of local broadcaster Bars, to 10 days imprisonment on charges of disobeying a police officer, according to his outlet, multiple media reports, and a court statement.
Police detained Kustov, who was reporting on the crash of a Russian military aircraft in Ivanovo, a region northeast of the capital, Moscow, on March 12, for four hours before releasing him; his phone was also briefly confiscated.
“The arrest of journalist Sergey Kustov, who was covering a plane crash, is yet another attempt by Russian authorities to stifle any independent reporting,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator. “Russian authorities should immediately release Kustov, drop all charges against him, and let members of the press work freely and without fear of being detained.”
According to the court statement, Kustov “showed disobedience to military police officers, namely, he did not comply with repeated lawful demands of military police officers to leave the area of the IL-76 [Russian military aircraft] crash site.”
Kustov denied that the military police made any demands, saying that “if they had, he would certainly have complied with them,” his outlet reported. CPJ’s messages to the outlet for comment did not receive a reply.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said on March 12 that one of the aircraft’s engines caught fire, resulting in the death of all 15 people aboard, according to Russian state news agency TASS.
Separately, on Sunday, March 17, police in Saint-Petersburg detained Fyodor Danilov, a correspondent with local news outlet Fontanka, while he was covering the election at a polling station, according to his outlet.
Danilov, who was accredited to cover the elections, arrived at the polling station around 11:30 a.m. and was arrested after 5 to 10 minutes for allegedly waving his arms and using obscene language, which he denied. Danilov was released after two hours without charge, he told CPJ, adding on March 18 that he was “continuing” his work.
At noon on that day, thousands of people, led by the Russian opposition, turned up at polling stations in Russia and abroad to peacefully protest the re-election of Vladimir Putin.
CPJ did not receive a response to emails sent to the Saint Petersburg police and Ivanov district court requesting comment on the journalists’ detentions.
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