Sport for Rights

Dear Mr. President: As Tunisia’s October presidential and parliamentary elections draw closer, the Committee to Protect Journalists is writing to you for the second time in four months to protest reprisals against critical journalists and their families. It is inconceivable that free and fair elections can take place in an environment in which independent media are harassed and silenced. We urge you to honor your oft-stated commitment to promote free expression, and we ask that you instruct your government to allow our colleagues to perform their work unhindered.

A year ago last week in Senegal, two reporters covering a soccer match were assaulted with tasers, handcuffed, and abused by police officers after the reporters refused to halt a post-game interview at Léopold Sédar Senghor Stadium in the capital, Dakar. A year on, Senegalese law enforcement has fallen short in bringing to account those…

Nina Ognianova, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, provided testimony to the U.S. Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe on the pressing issue of impunity in journalist murders in Russia. The commission held a hearing this week on Russia’s human rights record. A transcript of the testimony follows:

Dear President Obama: In advance of your July 6-8 summit in Moscow with President Dmitry Medvedev, we’d like to draw your attention to the pressing issue of impunity in violent crimes against journalists in Russia. We ask you to place this issue on the agenda for your talks. Seventeen journalists have been murdered for their work or have died under suspicious circumstances since 2000. In only one case have the killers been convicted. In every case, the masterminds remain unpunished.

Dear Prime Minister al-Maliki: The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and the Journalistic Freedoms Observatory (JFO) would like to bring to your attention several issues that harm press freedom in Iraq. In recent months, our organizations have documented a number of assaults and instances of harassment committed by government officials against journalists in various parts of the country under the control of Iraq’s central government.

New York, June 3, 2009–The Committee to Protect Journalists welcomes the arrests of three additional suspects in the October 2008 murders of Ivo Pukanic, owner and editorial director of the Zagreb-based political weekly Nacional, and Niko Franjic, the publication’s marketing director. Three other suspects had been arrested in November 2008. 

CPJ names the worst online oppressors. Booming online cultures in many Asian and Middle Eastern nations have led to aggressive government repression. Burma leads the dishonor roll.

Internationally acclaimed Kurdish Iranian filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi published a letter today on the Web site of the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran about his fiancee, jailed Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi. 

Nearly a week after CPJ sent a letter to Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali urging him to end the “ongoing cycle of repression of critical journalists and media outlets,” Tunisia’s Ministry of Justice and Human Rights told Mohamed Abbou, a prominent human rights lawyer and writer, in a phone call on Saturday that…