Dear Mr. Gómez, The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is writing to express its sorrow over the July 4 assassination of Marisol Revelo Barón, a journalist based in Tumaco in the southwestern department of Nariño. We urge you to see to it that the perpetrators of this crime are brought to justice swiftly.
Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is writing to strongly protest the Lebanese authorities’ recent decision to annul the passport of Raghida Dergham, the New York bureau chief for the London-based daily Al-Hayat and a widely respected commentator on Arab affairs.
Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is deeply concerned about the safety of German journalist Andreas Lorenz, apparently kidnapped July 2 on the southern island of Jolo. CPJ calls on your government to ensure he remains unharmed and to secure his immediate release.
Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) deplores your administration’s decision to reimpose censorship restrictions on the media. A July 1 amendment to the emergency regulations issued in early May gives Your Excellency the power to appoint a Competent Authority charged with enforcing the censorship provisions. This move undermines the spirit of last week’s ruling by the Supreme Court of Sri Lanka, in which a three-member bench unanimously held that the decisions of the chief censor were invalid and without legal force because he had been improperly appointed as the Competent Authority.
Your Excellency, The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is gratified that Mexican journalists have generally been able to cover the current election campaign without government interference. However, we would like to express our concern about a number of recent incidents.
Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) strongly protests the house arrest of writer Dr. Nguyen Xuan Tu, better known by his pen name Dr. Ha Sy Phu. We call on the Vietnamese government to restore Dr. Ha’s liberty and abandon legal actions currently pending against him.
Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is gravely disturbed by your regime’s plans to tighten state control over the press in Côte d’Ivoire. According to CPJ’s sources in Abidjan, Information Minister Captain Henri Cesar Sama announced on June 23 that the ruling National Public Salvation Committee (CNSP) would soon release a list of measures designed to block the publication of any information “likely to negatively affect the credibility of journalists, national security and social peace.”
Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is deeply disturbed by several recent incidents in which individuals closely linked to your political party attacked individual journalists and a local publishing house in Sarajevo.
Your Excellency, The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is outraged by the continued persecution of Freddy Loseke Lisumbu la Yayenga, editor of the Kinshasa-based weekly La Libre Afrique. We condemn Loseke’s recent conviction for “insulting the army,” an absurd charge that is an affront to the most basic standards of press freedom.
Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is greatly disturbed by the fact that an independent journalist in your country has been jailed for insulting a judge. On June 19, a Jalal-Abad city court sentenced Moldosali Ibraimov, a reporter with the independent regional weekly Akyikat, to two years imprisonment for criminal defamation. He was also fined 100,000 soms (US$1,230); a similar fine was imposed on Akyikat, according to local news reports and CPJ sources in Bishkek. He is currently in jail pending an appeal.