Five months after the death of a young woman in morality police custody sparked widespread protests, Iranian authorities are charging journalists who covered the uprising with anti-state crimes. In many of these cases, authorities have powerful tools at their disposal to aid in convictions: journalists’ phones and laptops. CPJ counted at least 95 journalists arrested since the start of the protests….
On April 13, police in Russia’s Khakassiya republic arrested Mikhail Afanasyev and seized his digital devices. Afanasyev, chief editor of the online magazine Novy Fokus, was detained based on an article about riot police in southern Siberia refusing to serve in Ukraine. He faces a possible 10-year prison sentence for spreading “false” information. It’s not surprising for…
In mid-September, an enterprising young Iranian reporter named Niloofar Hamedi went to Tehran’s Kasra Hospital to report on a woman arrested by the county’s morality police for not properly wearing her hijab. That woman, 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, was in a coma after allegedly being beaten by police; she later died of her injuries. Hamedi, a…
CPJ has joined more than 60 civil society organizations in a letter calling Egyptian authorities to immediately release British-Egyptian blogger and activist Alaa Abdelfattah after he announced that he will escalate his hunger strike in prison. Abdelfattah, imprisoned since 2019, began a hunger strike in April of no more than 100 calories per day, which resulted in the severe…
The human rights records of Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco are under review by the United Nations Human Rights Council through the Universal Periodic Review (UPR). This U.N. mechanism is a peer-review process that surveys the human rights performance of member states, monitoring progress from previous review cycles, and presents a list of recommendations on how a…
By CPJ MENA Staff Last July, when the Pegasus Project investigation revealed that imprisoned Moroccan journalist Soulaiman Raissouni was selected for surveillance by Israeli-made Pegasus spyware, the journalist could only laugh. “I was so sure,” his wife Kholoud Mokhtari said Raissouni told her from prison. Raissouni is one of seven local journalists named by the…
In late June, the general counsel of NSO Group, the Israeli company responsible for the deeply intrusive spyware tool, Pegasus, appeared before a committee established by members of the European Parliament (MEPs). Called the PEGA Committee colloquially, the Parliament established it to investigate allegations that EU member states and others have used “Pegasus and equivalent…
CPJ has joined 46 human rights organizations and individuals in calling for Egyptian authorities to immediately release Egyptian journalist and blogger Alaa Abdelfattah and his lawyer Mohamed al-Baker after three years of imprisonment. The September 29 letter also calls on British authorities to intervene to secure the release of Abdelfattah, who obtained U.K. citizenship while…
When mass protests erupted in Iran more than a week ago, the government cracked down hard. While clashes between security forces and demonstrators left many dead and disruptions to internet service made information hard to obtain, CPJ learned that security forces had arrested at least 28 journalists as of September 29. (Click here for CPJ’s…
When a CPJ researcher sat down with Lotfi Hajji, Tunisia bureau chief of Qatari broadcaster Al-Jazeera at a coffee shop in Tunis in July, we noticed that a man sitting directly behind us was recording our conversation on his phone. When we stood up to take a selfie with him in the background, the man…