Free expression in the Middle East & North Africa
On Thursday, I participated in a panel discussion about media in the Middle East at the United Nations to commemorate World Press Freedom Day. Other panellists included Alya Al-Thani, counsellor, Permanent Mission of Qatar to the United Nations; Abderrahim Foukara, chief of the Washington Bureau of Al-Jazeera; Ebtihal Mubarak, journalist for Saudi Arabia’s English-language daily…
Ossébi’s byline missing as sensitive case moves forward
A French judge on Tuesday authorized an anti-corruption group to pursue a complaint that questions how the leaders of three oil-rich, central African nations amassed their personal assets. One byline was absent in news media coverage: Bruno Ossébi, an online Congolese columnist and one of the few local journalists who had covered the sensitive issue.…
Chinese bloggers often go missing
CPJ’s ranking is helpful in that it makes the world pay attention to countries that censor the Internet. I do not know much about other countries, but I know about China. I believe that the outside world (as well as people within China) cannot actually know how many people are jailed because of Internet speech.…
Bloggers in Burma write at great risk
Blogging in Burma is nearly as dangerous as protesting on the streets against the country’s military-run government. So it will come as no surprise to those who closely monitor Burma’s heavily restricted media and censored Internet that CPJ has ranked the country as the worst place in the world to be a blogger.
A Cuban blogger confronts ‘silent repression’
Why write a blog? My reasons might not be convincing, but to me, they are enough. The most important paper in my country is Granma, the official organ of the Communist Party in Cuba. You open it, you read it, and you don’t see anything. Nothing about the day that we are living in the…
A blogger in Tunisia: My life with the censor
The specter of government opposition to blogging, journalism, and free expression in general in Tunisia is so intense that the mere appearance of a specific name online is enough to push the government to block the Web site where it appears, even if that site is not critical of the government.
The ‘cruel censorship’ of Turkmenistan
Even though Turkmen President Gurbanguly Berdymuhammedov announced two years ago the necessity of universal Internet access, the Web is more than restricted in the country. This is connected to cruel official censorship, the serious limitation of the availability and speed of Internet connections in cities, and its total absence in villages. I haven’t even mentioned…