704 results
AFGHANISTAN: 1 Ali Mohaqqiq Nasab, Haqooq-i-Zan (Women’s Rights) Imprisoned: October 1, 2005 The attorney general ordered editor Nasab’s arrest on blasphemy charges after the religious adviser to President Hamid Karzai, Mohaiuddin Baluch, filed a complaint about his magazine. “I took the two magazines and spoke to the Supreme Court chief, who wrote to the attorney…
AFGHANISTAN: 1 Ali Mohaqqiq Nasab, Haqooq-i-Zan (Women’s Rights) Imprisoned: October 1, 2005 The attorney general ordered editor Nasab’s arrest on blasphemy charges after the religious adviser to President Hamid Karzai, Mohaiuddin Baluch, filed a complaint about his magazine. “I took the two magazines and spoke to the Supreme Court chief, who wrote to the attorney…
AFGHANISTAN The number of news outlets grew yet again, continuing an expansion of the media that began with the fall of the Taliban regime in December 2001. With journalism’s higher profile, however, came increases in threats, attacks, and detentions targeting the press. These cases had a chilling effect on the news media, leading to greater…
HAITI Amid civil unrest, political turmoil, and spiraling violence, the poorest country in the Western hemisphere remained a very dangerous place for journalists. The fall of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004 created a political vacuum; street gangs, drug traffickers, corrupt police, ex-soldiers from the disbanded military, and the ousted leader’s supporters sought violently to…
IRAN Hard-liners in government and the judiciary continued a crackdown on the independent media in general and on Internet journalists in particular. In the course of the year, authorities jailed Web bloggers, banned four newspapers for publishing a letter by a reformist cleric, and closed the Tehran bureau of the Arabic-language satellite-TV channel Al-Jazeera.
KAZAKHSTAN President Nursultan Nazarbayev took few chances with his political fortunes as December presidential elections approached, using state-controlled media to burnish his image and employing the many levers of his authoritarian government to crack down on opposition and independent news media. His government blocked the printing of several independent and opposition newspapers, seized entire press…
UZBEKISTAN President Islam Karimov engaged in a full-fledged offensive against the independent press. Unrelenting government persecution drove out more than a dozen foreign correspondents and local reporters working for foreign media; continual harassment forced at least two news agencies and a media training organization to close their offices. Karimov and his allies used trumped-up charges…
New York, February 1, 2006—Police in the southern Belarusian town of Zhlobin confiscated several hundred copies of Tovarishch (Comrade), the official newspaper of the Belarusian Communist Party, on Tuesday, the independent news agency Belapan reported. Vladimir Katsora, a Tovarishch distributor, was transporting copies to the city of Gomel. The seized issue contained coverage of the…
New York, December 9, 2005—The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns the detention of journalist Hang Sakhorn on a charge of criminal libel, part of a growing government crackdown on freedom of expression in Cambodia. Sakhorn, editor of the occasional newspaper Ponleu Samaki, was arrested December 2 over an article published in September that accused state…