Attacks on the Press 2000: Uzbekistan
AS PRESIDENT ISLAM KARIMOV’S GOVERNMENT CONTINUED its harsh crackdown on Islamic militants, officials kept local media on a tight leash. Uzbek human rights workers, themselves targets of bureaucratic harassment and violence, condemned numerous violations of the rights of their fellow citizens, including journalists. In April, CPJ raised the plight of three imprisoned Uzbek journalists in…
Attacks on the Press 2000: Yugoslavia
PROSPECTS FOR PRESS FREEDOM IN YUGOSLAVIA BRIGHTENED when President Slobodan Milosevic finally accepted election results and resigned on October 6. The elected dictator’s all-out war on the independent media was a thing of the past, but official habits of intimidating the press did not disappear, and the difficulty of reforming Serbia’s state-run media became evident.…
Attacks on the Press in 2000: Journalists in Prison
EIGHTY-ONE JOURNALISTS WERE IN PRISON AROUND THE WORLD at the end of 2000, jailed for practicing their profession. The number is down slightly from the previous year, when 87 were in jail, and represents a significant decline from 1998, when 118 journalists were imprisoned. While jailing journalists can be an effective means of stifling bad…
Gazprom completes NTV takeover
April 3, 2001, New York – Russia’s state-dominated gas monopoly Gazprom used a shareholders meeting today to take formal control of the independent Russian television network, NTV. The new management removed NTV founder Vladimir Gusinsky and managing director Yevgeny Kiselyov from the station’s board of directors
CPJ meets with Gazprom Media chief
New York, March 6, 2001 — Alfred R. Kokh, general director of Russia’s Gazprom Media, visited the New York offices of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) today to assert that his company’s long-running dispute with Vladimir Gusinsky’s NTV television network was purely a business matter. In the course of a two-hour meeting, CPJ executive…
Turkey: Reporter Faces 12 Years in Prison for Article on Alleged Judicial Improprieties
First, let us take another look at the chronology of this terrifying event: Interior Minister Saadettin Tantan tells Justice Minister Hikmet Sami Turk that Prosecutor Oktar Cakir is “involved in malfeasance.” The Justice Minister then conveys this information to the Supreme Council of Judges and Prosecutors, which will elect the new chief prosecutor of the…
Russia: Journalist’s killers sought to intimidate his newspaper, CPJ research finds
Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) wishes to inform you that after a thorough investigation into the murder of Igor Domnikov, a reporter for the independent, twice-weekly newspaper Novaya Gazeta, we have concluded that Domnikov was targeted by assassins who sought to intimidate his paper.
24 JOURNALISTS KILLED FOR THEIR WORK IN 2000 Highest Tolls in Colombia, Russia, and Sierra Leone
New York, January 4, 2001 — Of the 24 journalists killed for their work in 2000, according to CPJ research, at least 16 were murdered, most of those in countries where assassins have learned they can kill journalists with impunity. This figure is down from 1999, when CPJ found that 34 journalists were killed for…
Belarus: Missing journalist feared dead; official investigation stalled
Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is deeply disturbed by the lack of progress in the investigation into the disappearance of Dmitry Zavadsky, a cameraman with the Russian public television network ORT who has been missing since July 7. Because no group has come forward to take responsibility for Zavadsky’s disappearance over the past six months, we now fear that the journalist may have been killed. The official investigation, which has been carried out in secret, now appears to be stalled.