Europe - Central Asia

Cihan Hayırsevener, editor of the local daily Güney Marmara’da Yaşam, was shot three times in the leg on December 19 while walking to his office in Bandirma, a town 60 miles (100 km) northeast of Istanbul, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has reported quoting local news reports. One bullet hit a major artery in his left leg, causing intensive bleeding. He was taken by...

A Tajik government decree charging privately-owned media for access to public information has been described as “utterly grotesque” by press freedom organisation Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). Issued on October 31, the decree “On the recovery by state institutions of the costs of presenting information” took effect on November 19. The media were not consulted about the decree, which was not...

There has been an unrelenting wave of unsolved attacks on journalists in Kyrgyzstan, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). In two separate cases on Tuesday, a journalist was beaten and a newspaper received a bullet in an envelope along with threatening notes, according to local news reports. Last week, several other journalists and political analysts who...

A Russian police officer who fatally shot an online publisher in government custody in 2008 was convicted of negligent homicide and sentenced to two years in a low-security prison settlement Friday, Reuters and other news agencies reported. The family of the victim, Magomed Yevloyev, told the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) they would appeal the verdict because their own...

Political analyst and columnist Alexander Knyazev was attacked near his home in Bishkek Wednesday evening by four men who punched and kicked him repeatedly and took his computer and briefcase, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. It was the second physical attack on this well-known political and media personality in the past two years and the eighth this year on journalists in Kyrgyzstan...

Death threats have been made against Iryna Khalip, Belarus correspondent for the Moscow-based independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has reported. In a memo to Novaya Gazeta, Khalip said she received threatening email, phone calls, and a telegram from anonymous senders who warned her not to publish the investigative report she wrote and...

Kyrgyzstan’s Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that the prosecution of a man accused in the 2007 murder of Alisher Saipov, editor of the Uzbek-language weekly Siyosat, can proceed, the independent news website Ferghana reported. Saipov’s family and colleagues have called the case bogus, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). The ruling came in an appeal filed by the...

Prominent Russian journalist Olga Kotovskaya was killed after she apparently fell from the 14th floor of a building in the centre of Kaliningrad (the capital of a Russian enclave between Poland and Lithuania) six days after a court ruled that she had been unfairly stripped of the TV station she had created, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. Kotovskaya died on November 16, six days...

Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has deplored the reported intention of the majority of the board of the German public television network ZDF – who are led by members of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrat Union – to reject the director-general’s request to renew editor-in-chief Nikolaus Brender’s contract for another five years. The press freedom organisation believes the opposition to...

The last restrictions on the use of the Kurdish language by the Turkish news media have been lifted, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. The government gazette published a directive on November 13 indefinitely lifting all remaining restrictions on the broadcast media’s use of minority languages. Use of Kurdish had been allowed in the print media and the national public TV station TRT 6...