ATR

President Ange-Félix Patassé spent much of the year cracking down on coup plotters as the media, clustered in the capital, Bangui, struggled to cope with harsh economic realities and a breakdown in the rule of law. In December 2000, President Patassé warned local journalists their “leisure time” was over. On February 4, 2001, police arrested…

After years of wrangling, Chile’s Congress finally passed a press law repealing some of the country’s most draconian defamation and libel statutes. There has been intense international pressure to rid Chile’s legal system of its severe restrictions on the press. But local media also credit President Ricardo Lagos with reviving the reforms, which were stalled…

The shaky coalition of reformist parties elected in 2000 after the death of the nationalist President Franjo Tudjman pressed ahead with political and economic reforms in 2001 and pushed to join the European Union. As a result, press freedom conditions in Croatia continued to improve. The government and the Parliament made some tentative efforts to…

During the four years that he ruled the Democratic Republic of Congo, President Laurent-Désiré Kabila compiled one of Africa’s worst press freedom records. On January 4, 2001, the last three journalists jailed by Kabila were released on the president’s personal orders. Two weeks later, Kabila was assassinated.

Egypt’s press remains one of the most influential in the Arab world. The editorial and opinion pages of the leading daily papers are widely read in many Arab countries for their coverage of regional affairs. On a local level, newspapers deal with a wide range of issues. Opposition papers, in particular, often criticize government officials…

Throughout the year, Gambian journalists feared that authoritarian president Yahya Jammeh and his ruling Alliance for Patriotic Reorientation and Construction (APRC) would deal harshly with journalists ahead of the October presidential elections. To the surprise of many, these fears proved misplaced. However, repression resumed soon after President Jammeh won reelection. One journalist was subsequently arrested…

India’s free press is perhaps the strongest pillar of its democracy, but Indian journalists continued to face numerous challenges in 2001, including physical threats, legal harassment, and more subtle pressures applied by the central government. In the disputed territory of Kashmir, where fighting between local separatists, foreign fighters, and Indian security forces has long forced…

Another year of political turmoil saw the Indonesian press clinging to its hard-won freedoms. But President Megawati Sukarnoputri, who took over from the quixotic Abdurrahman Wahid in July, is showing worrying signs of being less friendly toward the press than her predecessor. One of Megawati’s first acts in office was to appoint a state minister…

On January 8, President Laurent Gbagbo’s government thwarted an attempted coup by mercenaries whom the ruling Popular Front (FPI) accused of being in the pay of Burkina Faso and other countries bordering Côte d’Ivoire. The rebels occupied the compound of the official RTI broadcasting network and aired communiqués saying that the elected government had been…

King Abdullah II, who promised political reform when he began his reign in February 1999, has repeatedly affirmed that “the sky is the limit” for press freedom in Jordan. The reality is very different. Harsh new legal restrictions, along with familiar hardships such as threats and detentions, led to a deterioration in press freedom conditions…