Click here to read more about press freedom conditions in PANAMA New York, August 3, 2000 — Eleven months after pledging to eliminate Panama’s notorious “gag laws,” President Mireya Moscoso has signed a bill that sharply restricts public access to information. The new law broadens official definitions of privacy and confidentiality and applies harsh sanctions…
Click here to read more about press freedom conditions in YEMEN. New York, April 3, 2000 —The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) urges U.S. president Bill Clinton to put press freedom high on the agenda for his meeting with Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh in Washington tomorrow. Since the end of Yemen’s 1994 civil war,…
New York, March 10, 2000 — On February 23, authorities in Cameroon interrogated three journalists from the provincial station Radio Buea about a broadcast that criticized the government’s treatment of English-speaking Cameroonians, according to sources in Buea, a small rural town in Anglophone southwestern Cameroon. The program, titled “Refugees in France and Britain,” featured interviews…
New York, March 10, 2000 — Artyom Borovik, a legendary figure in Russian journalism, died in an air accident yesterday. He was one of four passengers and five crew members who were killed when their private plane crashed during takeoff from Moscow on a flight bound for the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv. Officials are looking into…
New York, March 10, 2000 — Two weeks after Radio Liberty correspondent Andrei Babitsky re-appeared following a month of mysterious captivity in Chechnya, confusion still surrounds his case. Today, the Russian Interfax news service reported that Babitsky had been charged with aiding Chechen rebels. Interfax said the Russian prosecutor general’s office had filed the charges,…
New York, March 8, 2000 — CPJ is deeply saddened by the February 24 murder of Uruguayan journalist Julio César Da Rosa, owner and editor of the independent station Radio del Centro, by former local official Nery Colombo, who shot the journalist and then killed himself. Radio del Centro broadcasts from Baltasar Brum, an isolated…
New York, March 7, 2000 — The family of jailed journalist Andre Domingos Mussamo are suffering dire financial need as a result of his prolonged incarceration, according to an appeal received by CPJ on March 3. Their telephone service has been cut off, and authorities have confiscated many of their possessions. Under Angola’s notorious state…
New York, March 7, 2000 — CPJ is troubled by threats against Ricardo Palma Michelsen, owner of the Lima station Radio Miraflores. Palma was first threatened after a January 8 broadcast in which journalist Oscar Díaz interviewed ex-president Alan García Pérez and Baruch Ivcher, former owner of the television station Frecuencia Latina-Canal 2. Ivcher was…
New York, March 7, 2000 — After a pre-dawn raid in which two employees were injured and transmission equipment stolen, the opposition station Studio B Television faced concerted legal harassment last night in Belgrade. At approximately 3 a.m. local time, five men wearing Serbian police uniforms forced their way into the Torlak broadcasting center, assaulted…
New York, March 6, 2000 — CPJ has confirmed the early release of Lin Hai, the Shanghai software entrepreneur who was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment on subversion charges in January 1999, for providing 30,000 e-mail addresses to VIP Reference, a pro-democracy online magazine. Lin was quietly released on September 23, 1999, six months ahead…