Europe & Central Asia

Miami, December 23, 2019 — British Virgin Islands Governor Augustus Jaspert should reject cybercrime legislation recently approved by the territory’s legislature, or require revisions to the bill to protect press freedom, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.

CPJ and four other international organizations today sent a letter to Kyrgyzstan authorities demanding they stop harassing local journalists who have covered alleged official corruption, and urging authorities to investigate threats and attacks against journalists.

Berlin, December 19, 2019 — Albanian President Ilir Meta should reject proposed legislation that would restrict news websites and stifle the free press, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.

Turkish intelligence agents arrested Arash Shoa-Shargh, an Iranian journalist living in exile in Turkey, on January 5, 2018, in Van, a city near Iran’s border, a friend of the journalist, who asked not to be named to protect their safety, told CPJ on December 16, 2019.

Leona O’Neill was reporting in Londonderry’s Creggan estate on April 18, 2019, the night Lyra McKee, 29, was struck by a bullet. Considered a rising star in the British and Irish media, McKee was the first journalist to be killed in Northern Ireland since 2001, CPJ noted at the time.

As wars subsided and a record low number of journalists were murdered in reprisal for reporting, the total number of journalists killed because of their work fell sharply in 2019. A CPJ special report by Elana Beiser

Vilnius, Lithuania, December 12, 2019 — Russian authorities should not contest the appeal of journalist Yegor Zhukov and should allow him to work without fear of prosecution, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.

For the fourth consecutive year, at least 250 journalists are imprisoned globally as authoritarians like Xi Jinping, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Mohammed bin Salman, and Abdel Fattah el-Sisi show no signs of letting up on the critical media. A CPJ special report by Elana Beiser

If somebody is legally under house arrest but in practice not, are they free? Semiha Şahin, an editor at the socialist Etkin News Agency (ETHA), confronts this question—and the legal ambiguity that it poses—every day. A Turkish court released the journalist under house arrest in June, pending the outcome of her trial, but authorities have…

Since 2010, the Hungarian government has achieved a degree of media control unprecedented in an EU member state, seven international organizations, including the Committee to Protect Journalists, said in a statement released today. The organizations urged the EU “to take all available measures to respond.”