February 2010 Archives

In an encouraging development, three courts in Colombia, Costa Rica, and Chile have recently followed the growing regional consensus against criminal defamation by dismissing criminal penalties against journalists accused of libel and slander.

The newsweekly magazine Semana reported that a piece written by Alfredo Molano, at left, in the op-ed pages of the Bogota-based daily El Espectador in February 2007 described how the members of a family in Cartagena and Valledupar had undue influence in private businesses and public offices in the country’s Caribbean region.

On the run for more than a calendar year from court-ordered arrest warrants, Osmeña Montañer and Estrella Sabay, the alleged masterminds in the 2005 murder of Philippine investigative journalist Marlene Garcia-Esperat, at left, are now out of hiding and back at work as senior Department of Agriculture finance officials, according to recent reports in the Philippine Daily Inquirer.

Italy was already the Internet freedom bad boy among western European democracies with its plans to extend broadcast TV licensing requirements to video sites. But the conviction today by a Milan judge of three Google executives is more than a one-off case of antisocial cyber behavior. It could end the protection that Web platforms now enjoy for user posted content. Potentially, that would mean that every video posted on the company’s YouTube site would have to be pre-screened for compliance with the law. That’s impossible for a site that is uploading almost a day’s worth of video every minute worldwide.

Internet freedom defenders had been expecting the worst for months, and Judge Oscar Magi didn’t disappoint. He gave six-month suspended prison sentences to David Drummond, Google's senior vice president and chief legal officer, Peter Fleischer, global privacy counsel, and George Reyes, a former chief financial officer. 

For those following the case of Bradley Roland Will, left, a U.S. activist-journalist killed while reporting on a protest movement in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca in 2006, a long wait ended on February 18. After 16 months in prison, Juan Manuel Martínez, a grassroots activist from an impoverished neighborhood in Oaxaca, left his cell after a federal appeals tribunal exonerated him of murdering Will.

In a thinly disguised effort to distract me during a poker game on Saturday night, a friend asked if CPJ was planning to take up the case of the photographer who was attacked by Sean Penn.

Frankly, this was the first time I’d heard of the incident that took place last October in which Penn allegedly kicked a photographer and smashed his camera. Penn was indicted on February 19, and will be arraigned on March 22. The altercation was captured on videotape and can be seen on TMZ.

Caretas, the leading newsweekly magazine in Perú, has a shocking photograph on its February 18 cover: a local judge aiming a gun at one of the publication’s reporters. Photojournalist Carlos Saavedra was on a stakeout trying to photograph Judge Raúl Rosales Mora when the incident occurred on February 13, according to CPJ interviews and local news reports.  

The magazine was working on a story about a controversial decision by Rosales, who had recently favored the appointment of a polemical judge to the country’s Constitutional Tribunal, the Peruvian press reported.

As part of three days of mourning in Haiti to remember the one-month anniversary of the January 12 earthquake, songs and prayers with melancholic voices echoing and images of a crowd mostly dressed in white were broadcast live on the state-owned National Radio and Television stations (RTNH).

The times, they’re getting a bit too interesting in Nepal. Journalists who are supposed to cover the news are becoming the news themselves.

On Tuesday, CPJ released its annual report, Attacks on the Press, with a global launch in six cities—Tokyo, New York, Brussels, Bogotá, Cairo, and Nairobi. We’ve noticed that different media reports, using our data, have cited slightly different numbers in regards to two key statics, the number of journalists killed and the number imprisoned in 2009—the global benchmarks for press freedom. We want to clear up any confusion. 

The two venues for the launch of Attacks on the Press in New York couldn’t have been more different. On Tuesday morning I was joined by Newsweek’s Maziar Bahari, and CPJ Asia Program Coordinator Bob Dietz in the hushed auditorium of the Dag Hammarskjöld Library at United Nations headquarters. The event was so well attended by the U.N. press corps that we ran out of copies of the book. The press conference went for more than an hour until I was slipped a note saying the U.N. spokesman needed the podium for the U.N. daily briefing.

The three main online news agencies in Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital, are struggling in the aftermath of the quake. Clarens Renois, the founding director of Haiti Press Network, addressed the outlet's future frankly: “In three months, I will close the agency,” he said. 

Shortly after arriving in Bogotá to launch Attacks on the Press, I realized the Colombian government was well aware of our concerns about illegal espionage against the media. Top government officials, including President Alvaro Uribe Vélez, had confirmed meetings with a delegation from CPJ and the local press freedom group Foundation for Freedom of the Press (FLIP) to discuss the findings of our annual report on the government's interception of phone conversations and e-mails (including some involving CPJ) and its surveillance of Colombian journalists.

“I didn’t wear the bulletproof jacket and helmet that Reuters gave me,” explained veteran Somali journalist Sahal Abdulle to a packed crowd at Nairobi’s Serena Hotel for CPJ’s launch of Attacks on the Press. “It didn’t seem right when my colleagues, local journalists, were risking their lives trying to cover the same event.” Abdulle, like all Somali journalists, faces immense challenges in covering the story in his war-ravaged country. According to this year’s findings in Attacks, nearly all the journalists killed in the line of duty in 2009 were local journalists—and nine of them were killed in Somalia.

Newsweek journalist Maziar Bahari helped us launch Attacks on the Press at the United Nations in New York today. Bahari, an Iranian-Canadian citizen, was labeled an enemy of the Iranian regime and cruelly imprisoned for 118 days last year in Tehran. His very presence today, CPJ Deputy Director Robert Mahoney noted, was testament to the “tremendous efforts of press freedom groups around the world" that have advocated for the release of jailed journalists. But with at least 47 journalists in jail in Iran as of February 1, according to CPJ research, it’s still a “pretty grim picture,” Mahoney said. 

“The e-mail came in at 8.48 p.m.,” Philippine journalist Maria Ressa told a hushed audience at CPJ’s panel discussion, Press Freedom: On the Frontlines and Online, this morning at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan in Tokyo. She was describing how the first photo from the November massacre in Maguindanao province reached the mainstream Philippine media. Thirty-two journalists and media workers were slaughtered in the deadliest single attack that CPJ has ever recorded.

Naziha Rejiba, editor of the Tunisian online publication Kalima and a 2009 International Press Freedom Awardee, helped us launch the new edition of Attacks on the Press at a press conference today in Cairo.

His collarbone severely fractured in the January 12 earthquake, Haitian journalist Yves Adler Boissonniere needed considerable medical attention—care that he could not get in his devastated country. With US$40 and a few gourdes (Haiti’s currency) in his pocket, Boissonniere decided in late January to cross the border to the Dominican Republic in hopes of getting care. Yet his situation remained exceedingly difficult: A few dollars could not pay for the X-rays, examinations, and treatment he needed. This week, Boissonniere’s prospects brightened when he received grants from international organizations, including CPJ, that will allow him to seek immediate care.

Katsuya Fujimoto and Shuichi Yutaka, the general secretary and the president of Shinbun Roren, the Japan Federation of Newspaper Workers’ Unions, sit at a table in their office in Tokyo’s Bunkyo-ku district amid a pile of papers. A software engineer with a media company and a journalist, each on two years’ leave, they are shuffling through documents showing their organization’s efforts to reform the Kisha Club system I wrote about yesterday. 

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez Frías has used cadenas—nationwide radio and television addresses that preempt programming on all stations—to challenge the private media’s news coverage and amplify the government’s voice. In his radio and TV call-in program, “Aló, Presidente” (Hello, President), Chávez often lambastes critics in the media and the political opposition.

Over the weekend I spent several hours with two prominent journalists in Chilpancingo, Mexico, wondering who murdered their colleague Jorge Ochoa Martínez on January 29, and hearing about some of the seemingly unbearable pressures on Mexican journalists. Ochoa was shot in the face as he was leaving a birthday party for a local politician in the town of Ayutla de los Libres.

The two Haitian dailies, Le Nouvelliste and Le Matin, are still coping with the devastating effects of the January earthquake. Though these outlets continue to disseminate news via the Internet, it will take them some time to resume publishing in print.

A Chinese dissident who writes about rights abuses is ending an involuntary exile in Japan on Friday. Or so he hopes.

Feng Zhenghu has booked a flight departing Japan’s Narita Airport for Shanghai at 9:45 a.m. on February 12. That was the topic of an impromptu press conference held Monday afternoon in the brightly lit lobby of the Nippon Press Center Building in central Tokyo.  A small crowd of Chinese and Japanese journalists clustered round him snapping photos while an anxious security guard paced up and down, interrupting every now and then to ask the group to disperse. 

In Uganda, a ruling this week in a landmark case of two journalists seeking to compel their government’s disclosure of multinationals oil deals highlighted the challenges to public transparency just before media leaders, press freedom advocates, officials, and former U.S. President Jimmy Carter gather in Ghana next week at the African Regional Conference on the Right of Access to Information.

Google has gone quiet since its announcement last month that it was unwilling to continue censoring search results on Google.cn in China. The Washington Post reported Thursday that the company is seeking help from the U.S. government to trace hackers behind security breaches, which it said targeted its own intellectual property and individual human rights activists. A Reuters analysis said the company may also be grappling with the financial and legal implications of ceasing censorship in defiance of Chinese law.

Regardless of Google’s next step or the motivations behind it, the company’s January 12 statement has already had a positive effect: Journalists and human rights activists who have long complained about e-mail security in relation to China have a much wider audience for their concerns. 

Argentine writer and journalist Tomás Eloy Martínez, who died on Monday after a long battle with cancer, was ranked among Latin America’s most prominent intellectuals. Best known for his novels about former President Juan Domingo Perón and his wife Eva, Martínez cared deeply about press freedom and was a passionate advocate who helped scores of Argentine reporters, and was actively involved in CPJ’s efforts to campaign on behalf on Cuban imprisoned journalists.

Martínez understood the difficulties journalists face while working on dangerous assignments or under repressive regimes. In 1975, he was forced to flee Argentina after serious threats from a right-wing paramilitary group. He lived in exile during the dictatorship era, and returned briefly to the country after democracy was restored in 1983.

Radio Metropole’s journalists, coping in a tent set up in the garden of the radio station’s office in Port-au-Prince, have not still resumed their normal pace of work because of the trauma caused by the January 12 earthquake. The station resumed its normal programming on February 1, after broadcasting news via the Internet for two weeks. 

In his speech, available on the parliament’s Web site, Karimov, at left, said the legislative body should strengthen its control over the executive branch of the government, and added that the success of this process largely depends on “active participation of mass media.”

As CPJ’s Haiti consultant Jean Roland Chery wrote Wednesday on the CPJ Blog, “Community radio stations play a leading role in local news coverage in Haiti’s most remote communities, filling the void left by private radio stations in the capital.” Today we can show you two videos clearly depicting the devastation to the Haitian local radio community after the earthquake.

Jordan’s Court of Cassation, the country’s highest judicial authority, issued an opinion last week stating that Web sites can be classified as “publications” and recommending that the Press and Publications Law be extended to online news sites and other electronic media. This decision, while not yet the law of the land, sets a legal precedent that lower courts can reference in future rulings, Jordan Bar Association official Ahmad Ghannam told The Jordan Times.