Attacks on the Press 2010: Sudan
Top Developments • Censorship intensifies before election; beatings, imprisonments reported. • Authorities use surveillance, harassment, severe legal restrictions to control news. Key Statistic 3: Rai al-Shaab journalists imprisoned, one of whom reported being tortured in custody. Sudanese journalists faced a familiar, toxic combination of censorship, legalistic harassment, and intimidation as a potentially historic national election…
Attacks on the Press 2010: Tunisia
Top Developments • Targeting journalists, government criminalizes contact with foreign organizations. • Private broadcast licenses are controlled by Ben Ali’s family and friends. Key Statistic 5: Years of imprisonment for violations of new law barring contact with foreign groups. Tunisia remained one of the region’s most repressive nations even as it sought to project an…
Attacks on the Press 2010: Yemen
Top Developments • Special press and security courts are used to silence probing journalists. • Redlines bar critical coverage of civil unrest, terrorism, corruption. Key Statistic 29: Days that reporter Abulelah Shaea was held incommunicado after being seized by security agents. The government pursued a widening array of repressive tactics, prompting many journalists to say…
Egyptian media say foreign journalists have ‘hidden agenda’
New York, February 5, 2011–As journalists face ongoing attacks and detentions in Cairo, they are increasingly concerned that state broadcasts are creating an atmosphere that is encouraging violence against the media, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. State television and radio, along with pro-Mubarak private stations, are giving frequent airtime to presenters and guests…
Internet censorship halts in Tunisia
So much has happened in Tunisia since I last blogged on the large-scale phishing attacks against activists and journalists in the country. With the fall of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, and a new interim government in place, online censorship seems to be ending. Opposition media and human rights sites are viewable, and CPJ’s Tunisia…
Being a Cuban journalist: Harassed, repressed, and jailed
The president of the tribunal looked to his right and said, “The prosecutor has the floor.” With a serious voice he pronounced the sentence: “The prosecutor ratifies the request for perpetual imprisonment for the accused, Victor Rolando Arroyo Carmona, for acts against the independence and territorial integrity of the country.”
In exile in the U.S., Ethiopian journalist struggles forward
After almost a year in exile in America, an icy ocean away from his home in Ethiopia, journalist Samson Mekonnen, left, only recently received his work permit in Washington. In the interim, like most journalists undergoing the emotionally and financially grueling resettlement process, he has relied on friends, family, and international organizations like CPJ to…