We released the following statement today after a magistrate court in the city of Samara convicted Sergei Kurt-Adzhiyev, editor of the shuttered local edition of the Moscow-based independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta, of using counterfeit Adobe, Microsoft, and 1C software to produce the newspaper. “The allegation of software piracy is nothing but a lame excuse for…
New York, July 28, 2008–The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns Friday’s vicious attack on Zurab Tsechoyev, editor of Mashr, a human rights Web site based in the volatile North Caucasus republic of Ingushetia. At least 50 armed, masked men in camouflage gear raided Tsechoyev’s home, shoved him into an armored personnel carrier, drove him to…
RUSSIA: New York, July 2, 2008—Two journalists in Russia’s Bashkortostan Republic have been convicted under the country’s vague extremism law. Each has been sentenced to serve a suspended two-year prison term. Their newspaper has been shuttered. On June 25, the Kirov District Court in the regional capital of Ufa, in the central Russian Republic of…
New York, June 19, 2008—The Committee to Protect Journalists is disturbed by the closing of the alternative English-language biweekly The eXile in Moscow. The paper announced on its Web site last week that it was forced to shut down after nervous investors withdrew support in the wake of a politicized audit of its content. “Russian…
RUSSIA: New York, June 18, 2008—Three men have been charged in connection with the October 2006 assassination of Novaya Gazeta journalist Anna Politkovskaya, the Investigative Committee at Russia’s Prosecutor-General’s Office announced today. With these charges, investigators have completed a preliminary investigation into the journalist’s immediate killers, a spokesman for the committee said. However, separate probes…
New York, June 17, 2008—The Committee to Protect Journalists denounces repeated efforts by authorities in the southern Russian republic of Ingushetia to shut down the regional news Web site Ingushetiya—one of the few remaining independent news outlets covering the volatile North Caucasus—for alleged extremism. On June 6, Kuntsevo district court in Moscow ordered the closure…
New York, May 1, 2008–An amendment that would allow the Russian courts to close media outlets for publishing defamatory statements has made its way through the parliament’s lower house, according to local press reports. On April 25, the State Duma approved on a first reading a restrictive bill that would add the dissemination of “deliberately…
CPJ’s Impunity Index ranks countries where killers of journalists go free New York, April 30, 2008 — Democracies from Colombia to India and Russia to the Philippines are among the worst countries in the world at prosecuting journalists’ killers according to the Impunity Index, a list of countries compiled by the Committee to Protect Journalists…