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Dear President Obama: In advance of your July 6-8 summit in Moscow with President Dmitry Medvedev, we’d like to draw your attention to the pressing issue of impunity in violent crimes against journalists in Russia. We ask you to place this issue on the agenda for your talks. Seventeen journalists have been murdered for their work or have died under suspicious circumstances since 2000. In only one case have the killers been convicted. In every case, the masterminds remain unpunished.

New York, June 24, 2009–The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on the government of Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh to end censorship of independent newspapers and to identify and prosecute those who assaulted Al-Jazeera journalists on two occasions in the south of the country. 

New York, June 23, 2009–Iranian security agents arrested about 25 employees of Kalameh Sabz, the reformist newspaper owned by presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi, after raiding the paper’s offices on Monday evening, according to local and international news reports. 

New York, June 23, 2009–A Gambian reporter arrested on Monday while covering a pre-trial hearing in the sedition case of seven journalists jailed last week, was still being held without charge late today, according to local journalists and news reports.

New York, June 22, 2009–The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on Iranian authorities to release all journalists detained in the aftermath of the disputed presidential election and to lift the onerous press restrictions that are choking information at a time when the country and the world most need it. At least 13 journalists detained during…

New York, June 22, 2009–Seven Gambian journalists charged with sedition last week for criticizing the president have been freed on bail, while two other detainees were released without charge, local journalists and the press union told CPJ today.

In Uganda last week, four journalists from the leading daily Monitor filed notice that they would challenge the constitutionality of the criminal libel laws before the Supreme Court, the country’s highest court, according to the newspaper’s lawyer, James Nangwala. 

Reacting to reports that New York Times reporter David Rohde and his assistant Tahir Ludin have escaped Taliban captors who held them for more than seven months, we issued the following statement:

My intention to remain in my home country, to use my pen to correct injustice, and to champion press freedom was aborted by security threats that forced me and my family into exile. I left behind my beloved country and editorial desk in the hands of perpetrators.