Georgia

CPJ: One in 6 jailed journalists held without charge Census shows an overall decline; China remains the leading jailer

New York, November 8, 2007—The Georgian government should immediately allow two private television stations to resume broadcasting, and it must lift a ban on news-gathering imposed on all other private broadcasters, the Committee to Protect Journalist said today.

The government shut two popular Tbilisi-based television channels shortly before declaring a state of emergency Wednesday night. Imedi, considered the main Georgian opposition television and radio broadcaster, was raided by special forces and taken off the air at 9 p.m. Kavkaziya, a small independent channel, was also shut down.

New York, June 29, 2007—The Committee to Protect Journalist is concerned about an attack reported by Nukri Kacharava, a camera operator for the independent Georgian television station Mze, who said Russian military officers assaulted him and confiscated his equipment as he was filming their move out of a Russian military base in Batumi, capital of the southwest Georgian republic of Adjara.

Some press gains are reported in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan but the Color Revolutions have yet to deliver lasting reforms.

The assassin in a baseball cap who gunned down Anna Politkovskaya outside her Moscow apartment used a silencer. But reverberations from the contract-style slaying of Russia's icon of investigative journalism were felt around the world.

Television news, which had rallied support for Georgia’s pro-democracy
revolution three years earlier, suffered serious blows from government harassment, business takeovers, and, as many saw it, self-inflicted scandal. President Mikhail Saakashvili’s administration took an aggressive approach in managing television coverage by pressuring and harassing critical TV reporters. Georgia’s largest television company, with holdings that included the influential Rustavi-2 station, changed hands in November amid considerable intrigue. And the hard-hitting independent station 202 went off the air in the fall after getting caught up in an extortion scandal.

JANUARY 17, 2007
Posted: January 26, 2007

Ilya Chachibaya, Giya Boklomi
ABDUCTED, THREATENED

Two unidentified men briefly abducted Chachibaya on his way to work in the western Georgian city of Zugdidi, according to local press reports and CPJ interviews. The men intercepted Chachibaya, forced him inside their sedan, threatened him, and told him to stop working as a journalist, Chachibaya told CPJ. Afterward, the men left him at an abandoned house just outside the city, he told CPJ.