New York, January 18, 2008—Minsk City Court in Belarus today imprisoned Aleksandr Sdvizhkov, an editor at the now-shuttered independent weekly Zgoda (Consensus) newspaper, for reprinting controversial Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in 2006. Sdvizhkov was charged with “incitement of religious hatred” and sentenced to three years in a high-security prison. Sdvizhkov was arrested on…
New York, January 14, 2008—The Committee to Protect Journalists is concerned about the detention of one freelance journalist and the interrogation of three others in Minsk, and it calls on Belarusian authorities to halt persecution of the independent press. Arseny Pakhomov, a freelance photographer working for the independent weekly Nasha Niva, was arrested and sentenced…
New York, December 17, 2007—The Committee to Protect Journalists is deeply worried about a defamation lawsuit by a Belarusian senior government official against the independent weekly Novy Chas in the capital, Minsk. A ruling against the paper would bankrupt Novy Chas and force it to shut down, according to local CPJ sources. In late October,…
New York, March 21, 2007—A judge in the western city of Grodno has sentenced Igor Bantsyr, a reporter for the independent Polish-language magazine Magazyn Polski na Uchodzstwie, to 10 days in prison for “uncensored swearing” in public. Judge Natalya Kozel of the Leninsky district court convicted Bantsyr on Monday after hearing testimony from two police…
Getting away with murder in the former Soviet states By Nina Ognianova The assassin in a baseball cap who gunned down Anna Politkovskaya outside her Moscow apartment used a silencer. But reverberations from the contract-style slaying of Russia’s icon of investigative journalism were felt around the world.
BELARUS Determined to forestall the kind of democratic uprising that toppled the government in neighboring Ukraine, authoritarian leader Aleksandr Lukashenko and his government crushed dissent in the run-up to the March presidential election—and well beyond. Official results showed that Lukashenko collected 83 percent of the vote to gain a third term, but international observers said…
Could you pick out Equatorial Guinea on the world map? Or Turkmenistan, or Eritrea? Probably not at the first attempt. These countries are usually below the radar of the international media, and the autocrats who run them like it that way. It helps them crush press freedoms and keep their population in the dark. That is why the Committee to Protect Journalists, a New York-based press freedom group, has drawn up a league table of the world’s 10 most censored countries. We hope that the list, issued on World Press Freedom Day, will shine a light into the dark corners of the world where governments and their political cronies decide what people will read, see, and hear.