On Wednesday, I posted an item about the dangers to journalists in Pakistan, reminding readers that at least two reporters—Canadian freelancer Beverley Giesbrecht, who goes by the name Khadija Abdul Qahaar, and British journalist Asad Qureshi—are being held captive somewhere along the border with Afghanistan. I later received a few e-mail messages reminding me that there are at least three journalists still being held in Afghanistan as well. Here are updates on the Afghan cases:
In
I just can't believe that it's been almost a year since I arrived in the States. It's been very quick, seemingly quicker than waiting in a drive-through line for a restaurant.
Every day at CPJ, we count numbers:
18 journalists killed in Russia since 2000, 32 journalists and media workers slaughtered
in the Maguindanao massacre, 88
journalists murdered over the last 10 years in Iraq. But on Tuesday night at
CPJ’s Impunity Summit at
We will not make significant advances in the battle against crimes against journalists and the impunity surrounding them without the creation of a sense of unity and solidarity among a country’s news media and journalists. Nor will the cause advance without a strategy by international press freedom organizations to provide support for those two values.
Journalist Dawit Isaac has spent 3,127 days in government custody in his native Eritrea, according to the ticker on FreeDawit, a Web site based in Sweden, Isaac’s adopted country, where he is a citizen. He has never been publicly charged with a crime or been given a trial. A thorny issue between Sweden and the Red Sea nation for many years, the imprisonment of Isaac sparked disagreement between diplomats for the two countries again this week.
When I asked Cuban journalist Oscar
Sánchez Madan to describe in one sentence his three years in jail, he told me: “I don’t wish on anybody the dreadful experience I had in prison.” A municipal court in Unión de Reyes, province of Matanzas, freed him on Sunday after he completed a three-year prison term. Around 6 a.m., the journalist, at left, picked up his clothes and other personal belongings and left Combinado del Sur, a prison for common criminals in Matanzas, northern Cuba. He also took along with him the cruel memories of his time behind bars.
Three months after the January 12 earthquake, Haiti’s oldest newspaper, Le Nouvelliste, has resumed daily publication. The April 6 issue not only signaled the resumption of daily publication, it marked a return to some normality, said Frantz Duval, the daily’s new editor-in-chief.
In the reclusive Red
Sea nation of Eritrea, the fate
of 10 journalists who disappeared in secret prisons following
a September 2001 government crackdown has been a virtual state secret—only occasionally
pierced by shreds of often unverifiable, secondhand information smuggled out of
the country by defectors or others fleeing into exile.
Somali journalists Hassan Ali Gesey and Abdihakim Jimale are roommates these days, living in a tiny, graffiti-ridden room in Nairobi, Kenya. Neither would have wanted to eke out an existence like this, but dire circumstances brought them together—starting with the night three years ago that Gesey saved Jimale’s life.
History seemed to repeat itself this week in the mountainous Central Asian nation of Kyrgyzstan. For the second time in five years, angry protesters—ignored and suppressed by a corrupt government—ousted yet another president.
The Iraqi government is keeping photographers away from scenes of suicide attacks, according to a piece published today by Stephen Farrell on The New York Times’ “At War” blog. CPJ has objected to government regulations promulgated in May 2007 barring photographers from the scene of such bombings for an hour after they take place.
The government of President
Zine El Abidine Ben Ali has made it clear there is little room for a critical
press in Tunisia. Taking
a cue from the government’s recent
anti-press actions, CPJ cartoonist Mick Stern imagines the president’s “ideal”
press conference.
See more Mick
Stern cartoons.
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