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EIGHTY-ONE JOURNALISTS WERE IN PRISON AROUND THE WORLD at the end of 2000, jailed for practicing their profession. The number is down slightly from the previous year, when 87 were in jail, and represents a significant decline from 1998, when 118 journalists were imprisoned. While jailing journalists can be an effective means of stifling bad…
Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) condemns the arrest and imprisonment of four Liberian journalists from the Monrovia daily The News on espionage charges. The four journalists have now been in jail for nearly three weeks.
Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is gravely disturbed by a National Assembly member’s recent attempt to strangle journalist Chahana Takiou of the private biweekly newspaper L’Independant. This bizarre incident occurred August 30 inside the National Assembly building in the capital, Bamako, CPJ sources say. Takiou was apparently reporting a story when Mamadou Gassama Diaby, a member of parliament from the ruling Democratic Alliance of Mali (ADEMA), assaulted him. Diaby punched and kicked Takiou several times before seizing him by the neck and attempting to throttle him.
Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is deeply disturbed by the recent closure of the Baku-based magazine Monitor Weekly and by your continued refusal to review the legality of the Interior Ministry’s October 1999 takeover of the independent station Sara Radio/TV.
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is outraged by the prolonged imprisonment of Gao Qinrong, a reporter for China’s state news agency, Xinhua. Gao has been in jail on trumped-up charges since December 4, 1998, for exposing flaws in a much-touted irrigation system in drought-plagued Yuncheng, Shanxi Province, according to his wife, Duan Maoying.
Speaking Out in Guatemala and l SalvadorBy Marylene SmeetsLast April, a mysterious program called “Hoy por Hoy” (“Right Now”) appeared on Guatemalan radio. The format consisted of gossip and political chitchat, and the hosts seemed to have it in for journalists. One of them often described Dina Fern‡ndez, a columnist and editor at Guatemala’s biggest…
After securing reelection in a hastily arranged January snap poll, President Nursultan Nazarbayev continued to consolidate his grip on the press by harassing independent and opposition media, covertly buying out some outlets, and attempting to put others out of business. Nazarbayev boasts that his regime privatized state-run media but generally fails to mention that most…
Among the increasingly authoritarian leaders of Central Asia, Kyrgyz president Askar Akayev is perceived as relatively democratic. At least publicly, Akayev has attempted to accommodate Western demands for improvements in the legal climate for media. Yet Kyrgyzstan’s small but feisty independent press is increasingly muzzled, and journalists say the Akayev administration is to blame. In…
Click here to read more about press freedom conditions in CHINA New York, August 3, 2000 — Xinhua state news agency reporter Gao Qinrong has been in jail on trumped-up charges since December 4, 1998, for doing exactly what China’s leaders asked the country’s journalists to do: help fight corruption.