New York, November 11, 2003—The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) condemns the prolonged detention of writer Tran Dung Tien and calls for his immediate release. Tien, 74, is scheduled to go on trial tomorrow at Hanoi People’s Court. A foreign ministry official announced today that Tien will be tried on charges of “abusing democratic rights…
New York, November 10, 2003—The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is monitoring reports that U.S. journalists and foreigners working for U.S. media in Afghanistan may be targeted for kidnapping in exchange for Taliban members in U.S. custody. At a State Department daily briefing on Friday, November 7, spokesman Richard Boucher said that the U.S. Embassy…
New York, November 10, 2003— The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) today announced the appointment of three new board members. They are: Dean Baquet, managing editor of the Los Angeles Times; Sandra Mims Rowe, editor of The Oregonian, and Paul E. Steiger, managing editor of The Wall Street Journal.
New York, November 10, 2003—Russia’s Supreme Court upheld the acquittal last week of two journalists from the Perm-based independent newspaper Zvezda who were charged with revealing state secrets. Yuri Shmidt, the journalists’ lawyer, said that the district court’s ruling was so strongly supportive of the journalists that it would have been impossible for the Supreme…
New York, November 6, 2003—The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is deeply troubled by the Israeli Government Press Office’s (GPO) new administrative guidelines for press accreditation, which were announced on Sunday, November 2. The guidelines, set to take effect on January 1, 2004, include a provision requiring the country’s internal security service, or Shin Bet,…
New York, November 5, 2003–Police officers in Equatorial Guinea arrested journalist Rodrigo Angue Nguema at his home in the capital, Malabo, on November 3. Angue Nguema works as a correspondent for the wire service Agence France-Presse (AFP), as well as several other foreign news organizations, and is one of the only independent journalists in the…
New York, November 3, 2003—Coalition forces in Iraq have released two Iranian journalists who had been held for four months on suspicion of spying. Said Abu Taleb and Soheil Kareemi, two journalists with Iranian State Television, were released today and returned to Iran. According to their colleagues, the journalists were in Iraq working on a…
New York, October 30, 2003— The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) condemns the Tuesday, October 28, gunfire attack on the offices of the independent station Radio Caraïbes, located in Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital. Caraïbes protested the attack by suspending newscasts on Wednesday. It plans to resume broadcast on Monday, November 3. At around 8:30 p.m. on…
New York, October 30, 2003—Russia’s Constitutional Court today struck down part of a law that sought to strengthen state regulation over independent media outlets, particularly coverage of election campaigns. According to local and international press reports, the court ruled that a sub-section of Article 48 of the law “On Fundamental Guarantees of Voters Rights” is…
New York, October 29, 2003—The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is concerned about the health of two imprisoned Cuban journalists who began a hunger strike on October 18 to protest the mistreatment of an imprisoned colleague. Mario Enrique Mayo Hernández and Adolfo Fernández Saínz, who are jailed at the Holguín Provincial Prison in eastern Cuba,…