Europe & Central Asia

When riot police stormed the Istanbul offices of Turkey’s largest newspaper, the daily Zaman, on March 4 following a court-ordered takeover, the Committee to Protect Journalists sent a public letter to Turkey’s Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, expressing dismay at the government’s actions and calling on him to uphold press freedom in Turkey.

Brussels, May 2, 2016–A Madrid court has ruled that Cruz Morcillo and Pablo Muñoz, two journalists at the Spanish daily ABC, should face trial for their reporting on a police wiretap investigation into suspected members of the Italian Camorra crime syndicate, according to news reports and Muñoz.

It feels strange to be writing about friends in jail. You wonder what kind of a friend you are–free to breathe the air, to walk the streets, to continue to work, while your friends cannot. Why do you deserve this privilege?

Late on the evening of September 16, 2000, 31-year-old Ukrainian investigative journalist Georgy Gongadze left a colleague’s house in Kiev and headed home to where his wife and young daughters awaited him. He never made it.

Inside a four-room apartment in Antakya, Turkey, a town on the border with Syria, more than a dozen men sat on mattresses on the floor. It was just past 10 p.m. and the soldiers, all men in the Free Syrian Army, the rebel opposition group in Syria, were busy coordinating their next trip into the…

A plurality of online voices is good for democracy, yet one group has come under attack in the most gruesome ways. Threats of rape, physical violence and graphic imagery are showing up in the inboxes and on the social media platforms of female journalists across the globe. Though online harassment of journalists is not new,…

When it comes to abusive readers’ comments and tweets from Internet trolls, Katherine O’Donnell has heard it all. For years, O’Donnell, who is night editor of the Scottish edition of the U.K.’s The Times, has borne the brunt of personal attacks, including about her gender, from online trolls who take umbrage at articles in her…

“Yeah… I went too far,” he said, which by most accounts would be an understatement. Among the Twitter comments this Internet troll posted to or about a female writer and activist were: “Rape her nice ass.” “I will find you.” “The police will do nothing.” The man, who agreed to be interviewed only under a…

New York, April 25, 2016–Kyrgyz authorities should immediately and fully comply with the U.N. Human Rights Committee’s calls to free imprisoned journalist Azimjon Askarov, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. Kyrgyzstan’s Supreme Court announced in a statement on its website today that if Askarov requests a review of his case, the Kyrgyz constitution obliges…