Asia

CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon spoke extensively to CNN.com’s Tom Watkins about the huge number of journalists imprisoned for their work around the globe. The piece comes at a time when two high profile cases–that of Roxana Saberi in Iran, and Euna Lee and Laura Ling in North Korea–have put the spotlight on jailed journalists. Read…

China’s National Human Rights Action Plan for 2009-2010 (English/Chinese), released Monday, contained plenty for the domestic media to praise, but enough omissions for international rights activists to jump on. 

The Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility reports today that a Philippine court has denied a motion to dismiss murder charges against two government officials accused of ordering the 2005 murder of journalist Marlene Garcia-Esperat.

“Get that guy–he’s a reporter.” The order, shouted in Burmese amid the chilling sound of gunfire, can be heard in the preview of the new documentary, “Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country” by Danish filmmaker Anders Ostergaard. The preview also includes the now-notorious footage of a Burmese soldier fatally shooting Japanese cameraman Kenji Nagai…

The dire situation for journalists in Sri Lanka who have fallen out of favor with the government has not gone unnoticed at the U.S. State Department. On March 23, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sent a letter to Senator Robert Casey, who chaired the Senate Foreign Affairs subcommittee hearing on Sri Lanka on February 24.…

There’s a familiar pattern emerging in Sri Lanka, one we’ve seen in many countries. When the government doesn’t have a viable case against a critical journalist, prosecutors turn to state security laws to keep them in detention.

Has the Chinese government learned a public relations lesson from its handling of the unrest in Tibet last year? 

January 6, 2009: The main control room of Colombo’s TV Sirasa is bombed. January 8, 2009: Prominent independent editor Lasantha Wickramatunga is killed by a hit-squad that attacks his car while it is blocked in traffic. January 23, 2009: Pro-government editor Upali Tennakoon is attacked under similar circumstances by a similar hit-squad. He is injured, but…

Yesterday’s arrest of Nadesapillai Vithyatharan in a suburb of Colombo was a continuation of the killing, jailing, harassing, and intimidating of Sri Lankan  journalists–and the feeling is that it if it hadn’t been for the quick response of the international community, Vithyatharan’s situation could have gotten a lot uglier.