Sarajevo, May 10, 2001 — In a meeting today with representatives from the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), the Serb chairman of the presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Zivko Radisic, pledged to bring to justice the perpetrators of a 1999 car-bomb attack on Bosnian Serb journalist Zelko Kopanja. As chairman of Bosnia’s joint presidency, Radisic…
Belgrade, May 8, 2001 In response to new challenges faced by the independent media in post-Milosevic Serbia, Kati Marton, a board member of the U.S.-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), met for two days of consultations with journalists and government officials in Belgrade. “We are very happy that there is a new atmosphere of…
Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), an independent organization dedicated to the defense of press freedom around the world, is deeply concerned about the takeover by Gazprom-Media of news outlets previously owned by the Media-Most company. Gazprom-Media is a subsidiary of Gazprom, a state-run gas monopoly.
Good evening respected viewers, The placard carried by a girl from Marmara University and bearing the words “Wasn’t 7.4 convincing enough?” caused many tempers to fray. A leaflet distributed at Ankara’s Kocatepe Mosque during a service to commemorate the death of Bediuzzaman Sait Nursi added further fuel to the flames. And when one of the…
New York, April 17, 2001 — After a tense 11-day standoff, the state-dominated Gazprom corporation succeeded in occupying the headquarters of NTV, formerly Russia’s only independent national television station, according to international press reports and local sources. At 3:30 a.m. on Saturday, April 14, Boris Jordan, a controversial American financier appointed by Gazprom to head…
Your Excellency, The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) welcomes the recent decision of the Almaty prosecutor’s office to drop criminal defamation charges against Bigeldy Gabdullin, editor of the opposition weekly XXI Vek. However, we remain deeply concerned about your government’s frequent use of politically-motivated criminal charges to harass opposition journalists.
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…