Morocco / Middle East & North Africa

  

Journalist on hunger strike

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…

Read More ›

CPJ condemns harassment and physical attacks on journalists

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.

Read More ›

State television bars Al-Jazeera from using its facilities

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…

Read More ›

Attacks on the Press 2002: Africa Analysis

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.

Read More ›

Attacks on the Press 2002: Middle East and North Africa Analysis

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…

Read More ›

Attacks on the Press 2002: Israel and the Occupied Territories (Including the Palestinian Authority Territories)

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…

Read More ›

Attacks on the Press 2002: Morocco

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…

Read More ›

Attacks on the Press 2002: United Arab Emirates

In the autocratic city-states that comprise the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.), local media face both the promise of new technology and the burdens of long-standing state restrictions.

Read More ›

Magazine confiscated

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…

Read More ›

Attacks on the Press 2001: Middle East Analysis

Bucking a worldwide trend toward democracy in the post-Cold War era, the political landscape of the Middle East and North Africa remained dominated by an assortment of military-backed regimes, police states, autocracies, and oligarchies. A new, younger generation of leaders has emerged in some countries in recent years, inheriting power and bringing hope for political…

Read More ›