OverviewBy Joel Campagna The conflict in Iraq led to a harrowing number of press attacks in 2004, with local journalists and media support workers primarily in the line of fire. Twenty-three journalists and 16 support staff—drivers, interpreters, fixers, and guards—were killed while on the job in Iraq in 2004. In all, 36 journalists and 18…
Egypt For the first time in years, Egyptian journalists are cautiously optimistic about prospects for press freedom. President Hosni Mubarak, whose record on press issues has been spotty since he took power in 1981, proposed decriminalizing press offenses as public debate about political reforms gained steam. Journalists, for their part, showed greater willingness to take…
New York, November 4, 2004—The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns Tuesday’s vicious attack on Abdel Halim Kandil, an editor and columnist at the opposition weekly Al-Arabi. The attack occurred just before dawn on November 2, after Kandil’s colleagues dropped him off near his home in Cairo, according to local sources and press reports. Before entering…
Egypt boasts many national, party, independent, and opposition publications that feature some of the Arab world’s best-known commentators. But over the years, the government has alternated between crackdowns on the media and periods of relative openness. For Egyptian journalists, self-censorship is the norm because violating the country’s stringent press laws can land them in prison.…
New York, February 24, 2004—Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak yesterday pledged to reform Egypt’s laws, eliminating prison sentences for published material. Galal Aref, head of the Egyptian Journalists’ Syndicate, told CPJ today that the Egyptian president called him yesterday and told him that journalists would no longer face the possibility of imprisonment for what they publish.…
New York, February 20, 2004—Egyptian Ambassador to the United States Nabil Fahmy told the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) yesterday that a U.S. journalist who was expelled from Egypt in late January without explanation can return to the country and resume his work. On January 29, at Cairo International Airport, Egyptian security authorities ordered Charles…
New York, July 8, 2003—The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) condemns the recent suspension of Al-Sada, the weekly newspaper of the Takaful party, a small Egyptian political group. Al-Sada editor Yasser Barakat told CPJ that the paper was suspended on June 25, and that agents from State Security Investigation department called in Essam Abdel Razek,…
New York, June 3, 2003—The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) condemns the recent imprisonment of Mostafa Bakry and his brother Mahmoud Bakry, editor-in-chief and deputy editor-in-chief, respectively, of the weekly newspaper Al-Osboa. On Sunday, June 1, Cairo’s Court of Cassation, Egypt’s highest legal authority, rejected the appeals of the journalists, who had been sentenced to…
Although the Kenya-based East African Standard, one of Africa’s oldest continuously published newspapers, marked its 100th anniversary in November, journalism remains a difficult profession on the continent, with adverse government policies and multifaceted economic woes still undermining the full development of African media.