Qatar

In the past month, officials in both the United Arab Emirates and Qatar have prevented journalists from reporting on important court proceedings. But it is not too late to allow the press to cover these crucial cases.

New York, April 19, 2011--The Committee to Protect Journalists is concerned by the detention and questioning of two sports journalists working in Qatar for the public Swiss broadcaster Radio Television Suisse (RTS). Both journalists were prevented from leaving the country for 13 days.

New York, May 19, 2010—The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns the decision by the Bahraini government to indefinitely suspend Al-Jazeera from reporting from the Gulf kingdom

On Thursday, I participated in a panel discussion about media in the Middle East at the United Nations to commemorate World Press Freedom Day. Other panellists included Alya Al-Thani, counsellor, Permanent Mission of Qatar to the United Nations; Abderrahim Foukara, chief of the Washington Bureau of Al-Jazeera; Ebtihal Mubarak, journalist for Saudi Arabia's English-language daily Arab News; and Ghassan Shabaneh, assistant professor of Middle East and International Studies at Marymount Manhattan College. I talked about the great obstacles to press freedom in the region...

April 2007