Europe - Central Asia

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has expressed concern over Russia's denial of entry to a British journalist into the country last week. Freelance journalist Simon Pirani had a valid, multiple-entry visa to Russia when he was stopped by border guards at Moscow’s Domodedovo airport on June 17. Officials handed him a “declaration of return,” which stated that he could not enter the country...

The editor in chief of Bulgarian news site Frog News was beaten unconscious by three masked attackers Monday evening in Sofia. The 54-year old journalist Ognyan Stefanov was attacked soon after he left a restaurant as the three men said they were policemen before they started battering the victim, Sofia News Agency reported. The editor and his family had recently received anonymous phone calls...

Stanislav Glukhov, editor-in-chief of the newspaper Khabarovsky Express, has been convicted of slander (a crime under Article 129 of the Russian Criminal Code), for disseminating false information and defaming Dmitry Rozenkov, a member of the local parliament, according to the Moscow-based Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations (CJES). The court found that Glukhov knowingly allowed the...

Turkish journalist Cengiz Kapmaz, editor of pro-Kurdish daily Alternatif, has been sentenced under the Anti-Terror Law to ten months in jail for “making propaganda” for the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) in an article published in June 2006, Paris-based Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. The Court of Assizes in Istanbul also sentenced the paper’s publisher Hasan Bayar and its owner, Ali...

The European Federation of Journalists has condemned the administrators of football in Romania for encouraging violent attacks on sports journalists. The Romanian Football Federation (FRF), led by president Mircea Sandu, a member of the Executive Committee of the European Football Federation UEFA, has encouraged some football professionals in Romania to act violently, including throwing stones and...

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has welcomed the decision by the 2008 Academy of the Chernoritzets Hrabar award in Sofia, on the recommendation of the Union of Bulgarian Publishers, to revoke a prize awarded earlier this year to a racist journalist. The prestigious Young Journalist of the Year prize given to Kalin Rumenov, a journalist with the Novinar national newspaper...

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) welcomed Tuesday the release of Telewizja Polska (TVP) crew members who were detained outside the Georgian village of Karaleti by South Ossetian militia members, and taken into custody in the regional capital, Tskhinvali, on Monday. Reporter Dariusz Bohatkiewicz told CPJ that authorities in Tskhinvali transferred him and his colleagues - cameraman Marcin...

South Ossetian and Russian authorities should immediately release three members of a Polish television crew detained today near the village of Karaleti in the buffer zone between South Ossetia and Georgia, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has said. Authorities confiscated equipment and cellphones from the Telewizja Polska (TVP) crew and were holding the three members incommunicado in the...

Roza Malsagova, the editor of the Ingushetiya.ru website, Ingushetia’s only source of independent news and information, has just lost an ally in her struggle against the government’s determination to suppress all coverage of human rights abuses in this southern Russian republic, which adjoins Chechnya and which is contaminated by the region’s conflicts. Magomed Yevloyev, the site’s owner

Authorities must thoroughly investigate the murder in Dagestan of Telman Alishayev, a reporter and host for the Islamic television channel TV-Chirkei, and the severe attack in Kabardino-Balkariya against Miloslav Bitokov, editor-in-chief of the independent weekly Gazeta Yuga, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has demanded. Alishayev died Wednesday gunshot wounds suffered in an attack on...