Novaya Gazeta

THE ASCENDANCY OF PRESIDENT VLADIMIR PUTIN brought an alarming assault on press freedom in Russia last year. Under the new president, the Kremlin imposed censorship in Chechnya, orchestrated legal cases against powerful media barons, and granted sweeping powers of surveillance to the security services (see special report).

Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) wishes to inform you that after a thorough investigation into the murder of Igor Domnikov, a reporter for the independent, twice-weekly newspaper Novaya Gazeta, we have concluded that Domnikov was targeted by assassins who sought to intimidate his paper.

New York, January 4, 2001 — Of the 24 journalists killed for their work in 2000, according to CPJ research, at least 16 were murdered, most of those in countries where assassins have learned they can kill journalists with impunity. This figure is down from 1999, when CPJ found that 34 journalists were killed for…

1. The issuing under your signature of the new “Doctrine on Information Security of the Russian Federation,” a Cold War-style text whose broad, ambiguous language can be used to justify severe repression of press freedom. 2. Your own statement — despite what you yourself have characterized as governmental mishandling of communication with the public over…

Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is gravely disturbed by the killing of journalist Igor Domnikov, a reporter and special-projects editor at the twice-weekly Moscow paper Novaya Gazeta, who died after suffering a violent assault in Moscow on the evening of May 12. We reiterate our demand for a thorough investigation of this case, as requested in our May 22 letter to Your Excellency.

Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is deeply troubled by the recent violent attack on Igor Domnikov, a reporter for the twice-weekly paper Novaya Gazeta in Moscow, and by your government’s recent announcement that it plans to interrogate reporters from both Novaya Gazeta and the Moscow daily Kommersant for publishing interviews with Chechen president Aslan Maskhadov.

President Aleksander Lukashenko, facing international condemnation for his boldfaced attempts to cling to power, resorted to increasingly crude tactics to rein in his media opponents. On July 20, President Lukashenko lost what little democratic legitimacy he still had when he refused to step down after his five-year term ended. Western countries, including the United States,…