Nueva York, 17 de octubre del 2003–El Comité para la Protección de los Periodistas (CPJ, por sus siglas en inglés) está sumamente alarmado por los ataques y amenazas contra medios de prensa y periodistas esta semana durante las masivas protestas antigubernamentales que amenazan con derrocar al gobierno boliviano. El miércoles 15 de octubre, atacantes no…
New York, October 10, 2003—Aleksei Sidorov, the editor-in-chief of the independent daily Tolyatinskoye Obozreniye, was murdered yesterday in Togliatti, a city situated on the Volga River 600 miles (960 kilometers) east of Moscow. Sidorov is the second editor-in-chief of Tolyatinskoye Obozreniye to be murdered in the last 18 months. His predecessor, Valery Ivanov, was shot…
New York, October 7, 2003—CPJ mourns the loss of a television crew and their driver from the national state broadcaster Channel One, who died in a car accident in the Siberian region of Tyumen while on assignment. Channel One journalist Natalia Astafyeva, cameraman Sergei Isakov, and driver Yuri Selyanov died on Saturday when their car…
New York, October 7, 2003—The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is deeply disappointed that the Kalininsky District Court, in the city of Chelyabinsk, today upheld journalist German Galkin’s conviction on criminal defamation charges and sentence of one year in a labor camp. On August 15, Galkin was convicted of criminal defamation following a trial that…
New York, October 1, 2003—The Second District Court in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius yesterday ruled that the State Security Department overstepped its authority when it shuttered the pro-independence Chechen Web site KavkazCenter on June 20. The State Security Department disconnected and confiscated KavkazCenter’s server at the private Vilnius-based Internet provider Elneta on June 20…
New York, September 26, 2003—The Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation has decided to hold a hearing on October 13 examining the constitutionality of legal amendments that recently strengthened state regulation over independent media outlets, particularly their coverage of election campaigns. The independent Moscow-based radio station Ekho Moskvy and the reformist Union of Right Forces…
New York, September 26, 2003—At a closed hearing yesterday, the City Court in Uzbekistan’s capital, Tashkent, rejected an appeal by jailed journalist and human rights activist Ruslan Sharipov to have his conviction and prison sentence overturned, according to local and international press reports. Instead, the court dropped one of the three charges against Sharipov and…
Vladimir Yatsina, ITAR-TASS, February 20, 2000, Chechnya Yatsina, a photographer with the Russian news agency ITAR-TASS, was killed in Chechnya by Chechen militants who had taken him hostage. Two former hostages, Alisher Orazaliyev from Kazakhstan, and Kirill Perchenko from Moscow, reported the killing in statements recorded by Amnesty International after their release at the end…
New York, September 24, 2003—Investigators from the Moscow Prosecutor General’s Office searched the office of the Moscow-based independent news Web site Grani.ru on Friday, September 19. Investigators said they wanted an original copy of an anonymous e-mail that Grani.ru had received on August 18 containing a video recording of two prosecutors working for the pro-Russian…
New York, September 18, 2003—Lithuanian border guards detained and expelled a film crew from the independent, Moscow-based national television station NTV on Sunday, September 14, after they filmed a protest on a train near the Lithuanian-Russian border. According to Russian and Lithuanian press reports, NTV journalist Vadim Fefilov, cameraman Vladimir Chervyakov, and sound technician Aleksey…