April 12,1999 — The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), a nonpartisan orginazation dedicated to the defense of press freedom around the world, is saddened and angered by the cold-blooded assassination of Slavko Curuvija, a publisher and editor in chief of the Belgrade-based daily Dnevni Telegraf and the weekly Evropljanin. Ann Cooper, CPJ’s executive director, called the…
New York, December 10, 1999 — In the latest official crackdown on local independent media organizations, financial police blocked accounts and froze assets of the Belgrade daily, Glas Javnosti, and of a printing company, ABC Grafika, this week. The organizations are charged with failing to pay taxes, a claim both deny. Managers at the newspaper…
New York, December 8, 1999 — The Belgrade daily newspapers Blic and Danas and the Studio B television station have been fined a total of 970,000 dinars (about $32,333 at the official rate of exchange) in a defamation case brought against them under the Serbian Information Law. The fines were announced Wednesday afternoon following a…
Your Excellency, The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is gravely concerned about a series of recent attacks on journalists covering the conflict in Chechnya. Two Chechen cameramen have been killed in recent weeks, while a Russian reporter and a French photojournalist have disappeared.
Shkelzen Maliqi is a chain-smoking Albanian intellectual with a salt-and-pepper beard who writes occasionally for local newspapers, works for the George Soros-funded Open Society Institute in Pristina, and has agreed to serve on the Media Policy Board. “We need a code of conduct for the press,” says Maliqi, arguing that Kosovo should adopt “a European…
The international presence in Kosovo has other important repercussions for local journalism. Many of the best local journalists are taking lucrative jobs as translators and media professionals for the many multilateral and non-governmental organizations that have set up shop in Pristina since the Yugoslav military withdrawal. “I can’t compete with their salaries,” says Margarita Kadriu,…
The OSCE initiative has drawn howls of protest from Western press freedom watchdogs. “The best way to combat hate speech is not to ban it,” read a New York Times editorial last month, “but to ensure that Kosovo’s citizens have access to alternative views.” Marilyn Greene of the Reston, Virginia-based World Press Freedom Committee agrees:…