New York, March 14, 2000 — Francisco “Pacho” Santos Calderón, editor of Colombia’s largest daily newspaper, El Tiempo, fled the country on March 11 after an apparent attempt was made on his life. According to one of Santos’ colleagues, the assassins were hired by members of the left-wing Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Colombia’s…
New York, March 14, 2000 — A leading reformist newspaper publisher who was shot in the face on March 12 is battling for his life in a Tehran hospital. Saeed Hajjarian, 47, an advisor to President Mohammad Khatami who also publishes the newspaper Sobh-e Emrooz, which has consistently criticized Iran’s hard-line religious rulers, may have…
New York, March 14, 2000 — In the latest government attack on independent media in Yugoslavia, police have shut down the opposition-run station Radio Television Pozega in the city of Pozega, 60 miles southwest of Belgrade. Police seized the station’s transmitter during the night of March 11-12, after accusing RTV Pozega of operating without a…
Click here to read CPJ’s protest letter New York, March 13, 2000 — CPJ is deeply concerned for the safety of DRC journalist Freddy Loseke Lisumbu la Yayenga, who faces the death penalty for having reported on a military coup plot against President Laurent-Désiré Kabila. In the early hours of December 31, 1999, armed soldiers…
Click here to read more about press freedom conditions in CHINA New York, August 3, 2000 — Xinhua state news agency reporter Gao Qinrong has been in jail on trumped-up charges since December 4, 1998, for doing exactly what China’s leaders asked the country’s journalists to do: help fight corruption.
Click here to read more about press freedom conditions in Egypt. New York, April 1, 2000 —The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), the New York-based press freedom watchdog, today condemned an Egyptian criminal court’s sentencing of three opposition journalists to prison terms of up totwo years for libel.
Click here to read more about press freedom conditions in PANAMA New York, August 3, 2000 — Carlos Singares, editor of the Panama City-based daily El Siglo, is currently serving an eight-day prison sentence for “disrespect” of the attorney general. Yesterday, an appeals court confirmed a 20-month prison sentence against him for having allegedly defamed…
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…