Europe & Central Asia

The Web site EurasiaNet has an article today looking at concerns surrounding the shutdown of foreign radio broadcasts in Azerbaijan. We released an alert on this troubling development on November 3, expressing concern at plans by President Ilham Aliyev’s administration to discontinue the broadcasts of the BBC, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and the Voice of America.

Alisher Saipov, a 26-year-old independent editor, was brutally silenced on October 24, 2007. An unidentified killer fired at him three times, using a Makarov pistol, in his hometown of Osh, Kyrgyzstan. 

Last weekend I participated in a conference in Venice, Italy, on climate change and the press. The meeting was hosted by former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev under the auspices on the World Political Forum, an organization Gorbachev founded in 2003 to foster discussion on “crucial problems that affect humankind.”

I met Anna Politkovskaya in person only once, in 2005. She was in New York to collect yet another journalism award, and stopped by CPJ one October afternoon. I remember her crossing the lobby with an even, determined step. She had an urgency about her–that rare focus that comes only with absolute clarity about one’s…

A week after the Committee to Protect Journalists released its special report on the current state of press freedom in Azerbaijan, “Finding Elmar’s Killers,” Ali Hasanov, head of public affairs at the office of President Ilham Aliyev, told local journalists: “Azerbaijan has done enough work to attain political pluralism, freedom of expression and of the…

During his weekly television and radio address a year ago, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez warned that foreigners who criticize him or his administration while visiting the country would be expelled. Chávez ordered officials to scrutinize statements by foreign public figures and deport any outspoken critics. While analysts thought this declaration was yet another instance of…

CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia Program Coordinator Nina Ognianova has a posting on The Guardian’s London-based “Comment is free” blog today about the continued repression of Azerbaijan’s independent press in the run-up to national elections. Read our special report about the dangerous situation for journalists in Azerbaijan, “Finding Elmar’s Killers,” here.Read Ognianova’s post at “Comment is free.”

“The current situation has made it necessary for the First Main Directorate (PGU) of [Russia’s] KGB to give the First Main Directorate of [Bulgaria’s] Ministry of Internal Affairs the following special means: devices for silent, mechanical ejection of special needles, containing swift poisons. …” The above is an excerpt from Addendum 13 of the “Perspective…

This Monday, the fourth anniversary of the Beslan school hostage crisis, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin sedated a Siberian tiger to save–or so legend has it–a state television crew. As survivors of the Beslan tragedy gathered at the graveyard outside the North Ossetian town to mourn the more than 330 victims–mostly children–killed in the massacre,…