Letters

Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) wishes to protest the Palestinian National Authority’s recent closure of the Ramallah bureau of the Qatar-based satellite channel Al-Jazeera. Al-Jazeera reported today that PNA security authorities, acting on orders from Your Excellency’s office, closed the station’s Ramallah bureau yesterday and barred its staff from entering the premises. The move apparently resulted from a current Al-Jazeera promotional trailer that advertised a forthcoming episode in a documentary series about the Lebanese civil war. PNA officials apparently felt that the trailer was insulting to Your Excellency.

Your Excellency, The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is deeply disturbed by your government’s recent crackdown on independent and opposition media in Kyrgyzstan, exemplified by the recent closure of the opposition twice-weekly newspaper Asaba and the suspension of the independent weekly Res Publica.

Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is writing to you on the occasion of the formation of your new government to express concern about the safety of journalists working in Israel and the occupied territories.

Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) condemns the arrest and imprisonment of four Liberian journalists from the Monrovia daily The News on espionage charges. The four journalists have now been in jail for nearly three weeks.

Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is gravely concerned over the disappearance of Krishna Sen, editor of the Nepali-language weekly Janadesh. Though authorities claim Sen was released from Rajbiraj Jail on the night of March 10, following a March 8 Supreme Court ruling that his detention violated Nepal’s habeas corpus protections, local journalists and human rights advocates have reported him missing.

Your Majesty: The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is deeply alarmed by the prison sentences and harsh financial penalties handed down on March 1 against two journalists at the weekly Le Journal Hebdomadaire. Abou Bakr Jamai, publications director of Le Journal Hebdomadaire and Ali Ammar, the newspaper’s general director, were convicted of defaming Foreign Minister Muhammed Ben Aissa and sentenced to jail terms of three and two months, respectively. Both men were also ordered to pay fines and damages totaling 2,020,000 Dirhams (about US$200,000). The charges stemmed from articles published last year in Le Journal Hebdomadaire’s now-defunct weekly predecessor, Le Journal. These had alleged that Ben Aissa profited from the purchase of an official residence during his tenure as Morocco’s ambassador to the United States in the late 1990s.

First, let us take another look at the chronology of this terrifying event: Interior Minister Saadettin Tantan tells Justice Minister Hikmet Sami Turk that Prosecutor Oktar Cakir is “involved in malfeasance.” The Justice Minister then conveys this information to the Supreme Council of Judges and Prosecutors, which will elect the new chief prosecutor of the…

Your Highness: The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is writing to reiterate its concern about the plight of two journalists currently serving life sentences in Kuwait for their alleged collaboration with Iraq during its occupation of Kuwait 10 years ago.

Your Excellency, We are writing to express our deep concern about the attack against the offices of the Guatemala City daily elPeriódico, which apparently resulted from the newspaper’s coverage of high-level corruption in your government.