New York, October 15, 2008–The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns an Egyptian court’s decision on Saturday to levy steep fines against an editor and reporter for an independent weekly that published a satirical piece about a prominent cleric.
New York, October 15, 2008–Nguyen Viet Chien, a reporter for the Vietnamese daily newspaper Thanh Nien who broke major stories on high-level government corruption in 2006, was sentenced today to two years in prison after being found guilty of “abusing democratic freedoms to infringe upon the interests of the state,” according to news reports.
Last weekend I participated in a conference in Venice, Italy, on climate change and the press. The meeting was hosted by former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev under the auspices on the World Political Forum, an organization Gorbachev founded in 2003 to foster discussion on “crucial problems that affect humankind.”
The attempted poisoning of Russian human rights lawyer Karinna Moskalenko, who is representing the family of Anna Politkovskaya, is the focus of a story in The New York Times this morning. The article cites our alert on the incident and raises concerns about the poisoning, which sickened Moskalenko only days before pretrial hearings in the…
New York, October 14, 2008–Mexican editor and publisher Miguel Angel Villagómez Valle was executed hours after being kidnapped on Thursday in the state of Michoacán. His body was found on Friday in neighboring Guerrero state. The Committee to Protect Journalists is investigating possible links between Villagómez’s death and his work as a journalist.
New York, October 14, 2008–The Committee to Protect Journalists is deeply concerned about the welfare of Russian lawyer Karinna Moskalenko, who represents the family of slain Novaya Gazeta journalist Anna Politkovskaya. Moskalenko was the target of an apparent poisoning in Strasbourg, France, days before she was due to appear in a Moscow court for pretrial…