The trial of six men accused of killing Mozambican journalist Carlos Cardoso in November 2000 ended on January 31. The defendants were sentenced to lengthy prison terms ranging from 23 to 28 years in jail for conspiring to kill Cardoso because of his aggressive coverage of a 1996 corruption scandal involving the state-controlled Commercial Bank…
There was hope for a peaceful resolution toe the political violence in Nepal on January 29, 2003, when the government and Maoist rebels signed a cease-fire agreement to halt their seven-year civil conflict. However, the deepening political crisis within the country’s constitutional monarchy and the eventual collapse of the cease-fire in August sparked a sharp…
After U.S. President George W. Bush claimed in his 2003 State of the Union address that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had attempted to buy uranium from the impoverished West African country of Niger, outraged journalists and President Mamadou Tandja, who has led the nation since its return to civilian rule in 1999, rallied to the…
In Nigeria’s first successful transfer between civilian administrations since independence in 1960, President Olusegun Obasanjo was re-elected in a landslide victory that also saw his ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP) make significant gains in polls across the country. Despite the relatively peaceful conduct of the election, opposition parties and election observers alleged widespread fraud, irregularities,…
North Korea’s goal in a global nuclear crisis put the country on the front page of international papers throughout 2003. But the regime’s absolute control over news and information ensured that the world continued to know little about what happened inside the country’s tightly fortified borders.
Although the press in Pakistan enjoyed greater freedom under its president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who took power in a military coup in 1999, journalists there still operate under pressure from the military, religious hard-liners, intelligence agencies, and the country’s antiquated blasphemy laws.
Panama is known for its institutionalized system of legal harassment against the press. Journalists there confront antiquated media laws that impose prison terms for defamation, criminalize criticism of public officials, and permit prior censorship. In July, Eduardo Bertoni, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights’ special rapporteur for freedom of expression, visited Panama and recommended that…
The overwhelming issue facing the Philippine press in 2003 was the increasing number of journalists murdered with impunity. In the last year alone, at least five journalists were slain in the course of their work–a toll surpassed only by war-related killings of journalists in Iraq. But in the Philippines, this violence is not a temporary…
Since the Social Democratic Party (PSD) came to power in 2001, the Romanian government has repeatedly tried to silence its critics in an attempt to stabilize relations with Europe and the United States and thereby secure membership in the European Union (EU) and NATO. Rather than battle the corruption that jeopardizes its status within the…
Russian president Vladimir Putin and his coterie of former intelligence officials pressed ahead in 2003 with his vision of a “dictatorship of the law” in Russia to create a “managed democracy.” Putin’s goal of an obedient and patriotic press meant that the Kremlin continued using various branches of the politicized state bureaucracy to rein in…