New York, May 12, 2003—Moroccan journalist Ali Lmrabet, who began a hunger strike on Tuesday, May 6, to protest continued government harassment, is scheduled to appear in a court in the capital, Rabat, tomorrow to face charges including “insulting the king” and “challenging the territorial integrity of the state.” According to Lmrabet, in April, police…
Your Majesty: The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is writing to protest the recent harassment and physical attacks on independent journalists in Morocco. Ali Lmrabet, director of two independent Casablanca-based weeklies, the French-language Demain and its Arabic sister publication Douman, has been subjected to an organized campaign of legal harassment by government authorities.
New York, April 3, 2003—The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is alarmed by state-owned Moroccan public television’s (TVM) decision to bar the satellite television station Al-Jazeera from using its facilities to feed broadcasts to the station’s headquarters in Doha, Qatar. Al-Jazeera’s correspondent in Morocco, Iqbal Ilhami, told CPJ that on March 30, she and her…
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.
The Arab world continues to lag behind the rest of the globe in civil and political rights, including press freedom. Despotic regimes of varying political shades regularly limit news that they think will undermine their power. Hopes that a new generation of leaders would tolerate criticism in the press have proved illusory, with many reforms…
While the press is largely free within Israel proper, the country’s military assault on the Occupied Territories fueled a sharp deterioration in press freedom in the West Bank and Gaza during much of 2002. Despite vocal international protest, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) committed an assortment of press freedom abuses, ranging from banning press access…
After Morocco’s King Muhammad assumed the throne in 1999, the press continued a trend toward aggressive reporting that had begun during the final two years of the rule of his father, the late King Hassan II. However, a number of official restrictions imposed on the press during the last three years have tempered optimism about…
New York, May 8, 2002—The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) condemns the Monday, May 6, confiscation of the intellectual and political magazine Wijhat Nadhar. Wijhat Nadhar editor El-Mostafa Soulaih told CPJ that staff contacted him from Al-Najah al-Jadidah printing press in Casablanca and told him that agents from the secret service, the Direction de la…