Your Excellency, The Committee to Protect Journalists is increasingly alarmed by repeated attacks against the media in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Such attacks are all the more troubling in the current context of campaigning for presidential and parliamentary elections due July 30. While one journalist was released on bail Wednesday, another has been jailed for more than six months in connection with his work. At least two radio stations remain off the air after attacks by security forces, while CPJ sources report at least one violent attack on a journalist in recent weeks. The government has also blocked the accreditation of a veteran correspondent for Radio France Internationale (RFI).
Your Excellency: We are writing to ask you to use the authority of your office to reform Costa Rica’s archaic defamation laws, which are incompatible with international standards of freedom of expression and rulings by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.
Your Excellency: We are writing to express our concern about a disturbing pattern of restrictions on the press in Iraq, and to urge your new government to take swift action to ensure the ability of journalists to carry out their work without official interference.
Your Excellency: We are writing to you as president of a country that is an elected member of the newly established United Nations Human Rights Council, to urge you to uphold the right to press freedom in Tunisia. The Council, which will meet later this month for the first time, is the main U.N. body tasked with promoting human rights. As an elected member Tunisia is required to “uphold the highest standards in the promotion and protection of human rights,” according to the U.N. General Assembly resolution that established the Council.
Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists is deeply troubled by the deterioration of press freedom in the Gambia. Authorities in your country have held a journalist without any official explanation since April 10 and have prevented his newspaper, The Independent, from operating for more than seven weeks.
Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists is deeply troubled by recent statements made by presidential spokesman Ignacio Bunye and the Philippine National Police (PNP) that many of the cases of journalists killed in the country have been solved and that the cases are unrelated to the issue of press freedom.
Dear President Musharraf: We are greatly concerned about the disappearance of our colleague Hayatullah Khan, who has been missing since he was abducted by unknown gunmen in North Waziristan along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan on December 5. Members of his family and his colleagues have repeatedly asked the Committee to Protect Journalists to find out where he is being held and seek his release.
Dear President Bush: We are greatly concerned about the disappearance of our colleague Hayatullah Khan, who has been missing since he was abducted by unknown gunmen in North Waziristan along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan on December 5. Members of his family and his colleagues have repeatedly asked the Committee to Protect Journalists to find out where he is being held and seek his release. With that in mind, we are writing to you and to Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf.
Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists is concerned about the imprisonment of Goshu Moges, a veteran journalist arrested in February in what police described as a crackdown on terrorists linked to opposition parties. We are seeking further information about the evidence against him.
Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists, an independent, nonpartisan organization dedicated to defending the rights of journalists worldwide, is deeply concerned about the fate of Mario Spezi, a veteran crime journalist imprisoned in the central Italian city of Perugia.