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.
“If nobody goes, then somebody has to go.” That, according to his editors at APF News, was the personal motto of fallen Japanese video journalist Kenji Nagai, who until his tragic death had reported from conflict zones around the world. That journalistic drive put Nagai in the line of fire during Burma’s 2007 Saffron Revolution,…
A week ago today, CPJ sent a letter of concern to President Blaise Compaoré of Burkina Faso urging his government to investigate a series of death threats sent in the past year or so via e-mail to independent journalists there. Using Yahoo France accounts, senders have boasted about intimidating the press in impunity by referencing…
“The government has barred independent journalists from travelling to the war zone”–the description of the Sri Lankan conflict has been among the most often-repeated for almost two years. News outlets want the latest pictures of the war in Sri Lanka and its civilian refugees. But displaced civilians who do manage to leave the war zone…
This week in the mountain Kingdom of Swaziland, the state-owned daily Swazi Observer reported that an official has apologized for summarily dismissing a female reporter from Parliament nearly two weeks ago. It was the latest in a controversy sparked by allegations of gender discrimination against Mantoe Phakathi, an award-winning journalist with the private monthly The…
Filmmaker Robyn Kriel, 25, from Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, spoke to PBS’ Wide Angle last week about the risks she took reporting from Zimbabwe in the lead-up to the country’s 2008 presidential election. Last April, CPJ closely followed the case of Kriel’s mother, Margaret Kriel, who was imprisoned for four days on accusations of “practicing journalism without accreditation.” You…
Exiled Cuban journalist Alejandro Gonzalez Raga spoke to reporters in Madrid on Monday as part of CPJ’s launch of our book, Attacks on the Press. He talked about the brutality of life in a Cuban prison, the torture he and other journalists who were jailed for their writing endured. Here are his remarks, in Spanish:
Ever since Radio Kalima staffers launched their new station on January 26, Tunisian plainclothes police have done everything they can to suppress the newly launched satellite radio station: besieging the offices for several days, threatening a managing editor with a knife, and finally breaking into the building and confiscating the equipment.