Emboldened by the growing number of U.S. troops in the country, President Askar Akayev has used the threat of international terrorism as an excuse to curb political dissent and suppress the independent and opposition media in Kyrgyzstan. Compliant courts often issue exorbitant damage awards in politically motivated libel suits, driving even the country’s most prominent…
Press freedom is generally respected in the United Kingdom, but CPJ was alarmed by a legal case in which Interbrew, a Belgium-based brewing group, and the British Financial Services Authority (FSA), a banking and investment watchdog agency, demanded that several U.K. media outlets turn over documents that had been leaked to them. The case threatened…
The exhilarating prospect of broad press freedoms that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union a decade ago has faded dramatically in much of the post-communist world. A considerable decline in press freedom conditions in Russia during the last year, along with the stranglehold authoritarian leaders have imposed on media in Central Asia, the Caucasus,…
Press freedom in Kyrgyzstan suffered major setbacks in 2001 as President Askar Akayev continued his increasingly repressive curtailment of dissent. Politically motivated civil libel suits resulted in exorbitant damage awards, driving some newsapers to the brink of bankruptcy.
Your Excellency, The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is deeply disturbed by your government’s recent harassment of several new independent media outlets. And we heartily object to a recent presidential decree that will make it easier to imprison journalists who criticize the government.
New York, July 19, 2001–A CPJ representative testified before a joint congressional subcommittee yesterday about the terrible state of press freedom in Central Asia. [Read the transcript] “Repression and violence, or the threat thereof, are ever present for many reporters, encouraging self-censorship as a survival mechanism,” CPJ Washington representative Frank Smyth told the joint hearing…
New York, April 13, 2001 — The Kyrgyz Parliament is currently considering the repeal of the republic’s notorious criminal libel statutes. A parliamentary committee recently circulated draft legislation to exclude articles 127 and 128 (for libel and insult respectively) from the Criminal Code. On April 4, committee chairman Azimbek Beknazarov told local reporters that the…
Your Excellency, The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is deeply disturbed by your government’s recent crackdown on independent and opposition media in Kyrgyzstan, exemplified by the recent closure of the opposition twice-weekly newspaper Asaba and the suspension of the independent weekly Res Publica.