Tunisian TV station’s suspension reflects tenuous freedom
On Sunday, the privately owned broadcaster Hannibal TV was forced off the air for more than three hours. The state-owned news agency Agence Tunis Afrique Presse (TAP) issued a statement stating that an arrest warrant had been issued for the station’s owner on charges of “high treason” for an alleged “plot to destabilize national security.”…
Will Tunisia’s ‘Internet revolution’ endure?
There has been a great deal written online about how much of a positive role the Internet played in recent events in Tunisia (if you’d like to catch up, Alex Howard’s link round-up provides a good summary of the many sides, both for and against). At CPJ, our focus is on slightly different questions: How…
In China, Kristof’s blogs are shut down
Nicholas Kristof’s Sunday column in The New York Times documents the latest in a series of tests the journalist has performed in Chinese cyberspace. The conflicting results he achieved while setting up a Chinese-language blog and micro-blog demonstrate how difficult it is to judge what censors will permit in an online space.
EU has contradictory message on Karimov, Lukashenko
Unless European Union officials mean to expose the inconsistency of their own policymaking, they should stand firm by their declared commitment to defend press freedom and human rights in the former Soviet countries. For now, their drastically different approaches to authoritarian leaders in Belarus and Uzbekistan leave one questioning the EU’s strategy.
In Chinese media, ‘a lot to be done’ is left unsaid
It is fair to report, as Agence France-Presse and others did today, that Chinese media largely avoided President Hu Jintao’s comments on human rights during a Washington press conference on Wednesday. But the nature of the omission is significant. Chinese reports acknowledged that a discussion of human rights took place between Hu and U.S. President…
EU should press Uzbekistan on news media crisis
Dear President Barroso: We’re writing in advance of your January 24 meeting in Brussels with Uzbek President Islam Karimov to urge you to raise Uzbekistan’s grave press freedom conditions and to make clear to Karimov that any improvement of the country’s relationship with Europe is dependent on him taking steps to fix the press freedom crisis. The European Union made clear it is committed to human rights in Central Asia in its 2009 plan, “The European Union and Central Asia: The New Partnership in Action.”
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…
Ecuadoran radio denied license renewal on bogus charges
New York, January 5, 2011–An Ecuadoran provincial radio station known for its criticism of local authorities was denied its license renewal based on bogus administrative violations, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. Ecuadoran regulators must allow the station to report the news freely, CPJ said.
Tunisia invades, censors Facebook, other accounts
The Tunisian government has been a notorious censor for many years, for journalists online and off. In the wake of widespread domestic protests in December, however, the authorities appear to have turned to even more repressive tactics to silence reporting. In the case of Internet bloggers, this includes what seems a remarkably invasive and technically…