New York, February 21, 2006—The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns the expulsion of a Polish journalist after he legally entered Belarus to report on presidential elections next month. Border guards detained Gazeta Wyborcza correspondent Waclaw Radziwinowicz on Sunday at the train station in the Western city of Grodno as he was traveling to the capital…
New York, February 21, 2006—The Committee to Protect Journalists is alarmed by the closure of a second Russian newspaper that published religious cartoons related to the controversy over Danish drawings of the Prophet Muhammad. The weekly Nash Region in the city of Vologda ran a montage of the Danish cartoons on February 15, with some…
New York, February 17, 2006— The Committee to Protect Journalists today called for investigations into two incidents in which journalists have been shot dead in Ecuador this week. In both cases it is unclear whether the journalists were killed for their work. On Monday, radio reporter José Luis Léon Desiderio was killed in the coastal…
New York, February 17, 2006—The Committee to Protect Journalists is deeply concerned by the record damages awarded by a Moroccan court against the independent weekly Le Journal Hebdomadaire in a defamation suit brought by a Belgian think tank. The magazine, which has been harassed by the government since its founding in the late 1990s, said…
New York, February 17, 2006—The Committee to Protect Journalists today condemned the imprisonment of two Ethiopian journalists for failing to pay hefty fines imposed in court cases stemming from their work. Both journalists were released after the Ethiopian Free Press Journalists’ Association (EFJA) raised the money to pay the fines, EFJA president Kifle Mulat told…
New York, February 17, 2006— The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on Bangladeshi authorities to fully investigate the bomb attack on Mahfuz Mamun and Babul Ahmed, writers for the daily Dainik Mathabhanga. Media reports in Bangladesh said the two men had written stories on drug trafficking for their paper a few weeks before the February…
New York, February 17, 2006—A Romanian court today remanded journalist Marian Garleanu of newspaper Romania Libera to 10 days in custody for possessing classified military documents about Western troops in Afghanistan and Iraq which he did not publish. Garleanu was arrested Thursday in the eastern city of Focsani as part of a broader investigation of…
New York, February 17, 2006—The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns the closure of a newspaper in the Russian city of Volgograd for publishing a cartoon of leading figures of Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam. Daily Gorodskiye Vesti (City News), which is partly owned by the Volgograd city administration, ran a cartoon on February 9 depicting…
New York, February 16, 2006—The Committee to Protect Journalists is alarmed by Mexican press reports of a plot by Mexican businessmen and state officials to imprison and assault journalist and human rights activist Lydia Cacho Ribeiro. Tapes of telephone conversations between several people, two of whom are said by the media to be the governor…
New York, February 16, 2006—The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns the arrest of seven Iranian journalists over a satirical article and is deeply concerned by an unconfirmed report that one of them has died in jail. Elham Afroutan and six other journalists of the weekly newspaper Tammadon-e Hormozgan were detained in the southern city of…