Amid ongoing attacks on journalists, CPJ advocacy in Europe
and Central Asia has generated some positive results.
Earlier this month, a CPJ delegation
met with Russian and European officials, who promised to revisit 17
journalist murders in Russia since 2000. The declared
commitment to reverse Russia’s grim record of impunity came after we
presented our own in-depth investigation into the unsolved
killings of Russian journalists in our report Anatomy
of Injustice.
Russian prosecutors have yet to report results in probes into two brutal beatings: Mikhail
Beketov in Khimki and Vadim
Rogozhin in Saratov. But at least their colleagues in Abakan and Tbilisi have dropped some bogus criminal charges against journalists following our advocacy.
When an explosion at the Russia’s
biggest power plant in southern Siberia
claimed dozens of lives in mid-August, Mikhail Afanasyev and his colleagues at
the online magazine Novy Fokus
immediately reported
on the accident. The journalists challenged the state’s response to the explosion
and said they believed workers were still trapped in sections of the plant. They hoped officials would respond, and, in a way, they
did--Abakan regional authorities opened a criminal case against the
journalist, claiming he had slandered local officials. Afanasyev faced up to
three years in prison if convicted.
Alarmed by this Soviet-style clampdown, CPJ
urged Abakan
prosecutors to drop charges against Afanasyev immediately. And angered by the
prosecution of their colleague, independent Russian journalists fiercely criticized
regional authorities. Facing mounting outrage,
police closed the case against the journalist, the Russian press reported in early
September.
In mid-September, CPJ learned that yet another Russian reporter
faced jail time in connection with his journalism. On September 3, Georgian
authorities filed a criminal
forgery charge against Besik Pipia, Tbilisi
bureau chief for the Russian news agency RIA-Novosti. Pipia told CPJ that
authorities claimed that he had forged a driver’s license that was first issued in 1991. The journalist, whose accreditation has
not been renewed since May, said his license had expired and he had asked
Georgian authorities in June to renew it. He next heard from authorities when prosecutors
told him of the criminal charge, which coincided with Georgia’s denial of entry
to two Russian journalists who planned to attend a public forum in Tbilisi. RIA-Novosti told
CPJ they believed Pipia was harassed due to his work for a Russian news agency
and asked for our help in the case.
We are aware that one-sided
reporting by state-controlled channels in Russia
and Georgia on the 2008
conflict in South Ossetia has undermined attitudes toward journalists from the opposing sides in the two
countries. So we took Pipia’s case. On September 18, CPJ
urged Georgian authorities to drop all charges against the journalist, who we
believed was singled out for working for a Russian news agency. A week later,
RIA-Novosti told us Pipia was cleared of all the charges following our advocacy
on his behalf.
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