Sri Lanka’s Black January: Year two
Black January commemorations in Colombo have become an annual event. Tuesday’s demonstration was the second. The protest aims to recall the series of killings and attacks on journalists in Sri Lanka in recent years, many of them occurring in Januaries past. All of them have gone untried and unpunished, sustaining the country’s perfect record of…
In Sri Lanka, justice for Eknelygoda is a waiting game
Three years ago, on January 24, 2010, columnist and cartoonist Prageeth Eknelygoda vanished on his way to work to cover the final campaigning in Sri Lanka’s bitterly contested presidential election. He has not been heard from since. The pro-opposition website he worked for, Lanka eNews, has been repeatedly attacked, its offices hit with arson, its staff…
Audio slideshow: A look at missing journalist James Foley
James Foley, a U.S. freelance journalist, was abducted in Syria in November. His colleague and friend Nicole Tung, a freelance photographer, spoke to CPJ about her experience working and traveling with Foley. A petition appealing for Foley’s release can be signed here.
Gambia’s NIA harasses, detains journalist without charge
Abuja, Nigeria, January 9, 2013–Gambian authorities should immediately release Abdoulie John, a journalist who has been detained without charge in Banjul since Monday, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. John has been harassed by the Gambian National Intelligence Agency since early December, news reports said. John, editor of the online news website Jollof News…
Kazakh reporter says he staged his own abduction
A journalist in Astana, the capital, said in a press conference on January 4, 2013, that he had staged his own disappearance in December to attract government attention to ongoing abuses in the country, according to news reports. Local journalists and press freedom organizations condemned the act, which they said caused “great damage” to the…
Confusion grows around missing Tibetan monk filmmaker
Not unusually, an already confusing situation in Tibet just got worse. Twenty-seven Tibetans have self-immolated in protest against Chinese this month alone, according to Human Rights Watch. That’s almost one a day. Against this chaotic backdrop, Chinese authorities have issued an arrest order for a missing monk who helped film a 2008 documentary about life…
One journalist killed, another reported missing in Syria
New York, October 16, 2012–The heavy toll on news media covering the conflict in Syria has grown yet again over the past week as a journalist for a pro-government TV station was killed and a Ukrainian journalist working for Russian news outlets is believed to be kidnapped.
Sandhya Eknelygoda speaks for Sri Lanka’s disappeared
When I first met Sandhya Eknelygoda in May 2010 in her home outside Colombo, she was a distressed mother of two young boys whose husband had gone missing. He was last seen four months earlier, just prior to the elections that returned President Mahinda Rajapaksa to power after the end of the decades-long war with…