New York, March 28, 2001 — Six Israeli journalists were prevented from covering this week’s Arab summit in Amman after Jordanian security authorities requested that they leave the country, citing threats on their safety, CPJ has learned. Roey Gilad, a spokesman for the Israeli embassy in Amman, told CPJ that Jordanian authorities asked the journalists…
New York, March 23, 2001 — Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat permitted the West Bank bureau of the Qatar-based satellite news channel Al-Jazeera to reopen on Friday after a three-day closure, according to press reports and CPJ sources at the station. Acting on orders from Arafat’s office, Palestinian National Authority (PNA) security personnel closed the station’s…
Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) wishes to protest the Palestinian National Authority’s recent closure of the Ramallah bureau of the Qatar-based satellite channel Al-Jazeera. Al-Jazeera reported today that PNA security authorities, acting on orders from Your Excellency’s office, closed the station’s Ramallah bureau yesterday and barred its staff from entering the premises. The move apparently resulted from a current Al-Jazeera promotional trailer that advertised a forthcoming episode in a documentary series about the Lebanese civil war. PNA officials apparently felt that the trailer was insulting to Your Excellency.
New York, March 21, 2001 — In a letter sent today to Kuwaiti ruler Sheikh Jaber al-Ahmed al-Sabah, CPJ expressed alarm about the murder of editor Hidaya Sultan al-Salem, owner and editor of the weekly magazine Al-Majales. While a motive for this killing has not yet been established, we fear that al-Salem may have been…
EIGHTY-ONE JOURNALISTS WERE IN PRISON AROUND THE WORLD at the end of 2000, jailed for practicing their profession. The number is down slightly from the previous year, when 87 were in jail, and represents a significant decline from 1998, when 118 journalists were imprisoned. While jailing journalists can be an effective means of stifling bad…
ALTHOUGH RIGHTS TO FREE EXPRESSION AND PRESS FREEDOM are enshrined in national constitutions from Algeria to Yemen, governments found many practical ways to restrict these freedoms. State ownership of the media, censorship, legal harassment, intimidation, and imprisonment of journalists were again among the favored tools of repression and control. In Iraq, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Syria,…
In North Korea, listening to a foreign broadcast is a crime punishable by death. In Colombia, right-wing paramilitary forces are suspected in the murders of three journalists in 2000. Meanwhile, paramilitary leader Carlos Castaño was formally charged with the 1999 murder of political satirist Jaime Garzón.
LATE IN THE YEAR, A SURGE OF POLITICAL VIOLENCE FURTHER DIMMED the prospects of President Abdel Aziz Bouteflika’s plan for national reconciliation and an end to Algeria’s nine years of civil strife. Particularly in Algiers and other cities, however, the country was far more peaceful than in previous years, and the intense government censorship and…
A YEAR AFTER WINNING A PRESIDENTIAL REFERENDUM in which he was the sole candidate, President Hosni Mubarak dashed hopes that his fourth sixth-year term would bring any loosening of official restraints on the media. Censorship and the jailing of journalists persisted, and there was a disturbing rash of violent police and other attacks against members…
PRESS FREEDOM IN THE MEMBER STATES of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)-Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE)-remained constrained by conservative, monarchical regimes. Although private media in these countries enjoy generous budgets and state-of-the-art technology, they face varying constraints on their ability to report news and opinion. Censorship, self-censorship, and…