Europe - Central Asia

Local television stations in the southern Kyrgyz city of Osh were ordered to cease transmission on Friday by the city government in the wake of interethnic violence in the region, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Osh residents now have access only to the state television channel, KTR, and several Russian television channels, the independent news agency Zpress reported. “We...

Istanbul’s Yargıtay High Court handed down on Friday a 15-month prison sentence to Turkish journalist Irfan Aktan, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Aktan was found guilty of “producing terrorist propaganda” in an article published in an issue of the biweekly Express in October 2009. The article described scepticism among Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) members toward a...

Armenian authorities have detained Ani Gevorgian, a journalist for the pro-opposition daily Haykakan Zhanamak, after she was arrested on assignment on Monday, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Police in capital Yerevan arrested Gevorgian as she was covering a sit-in at Liberty Square being staged by activists with the Armenian National Congress, Anna Akopyan, Haykakan...

Important testimony was given at the 13th hearing in the trial of Turkish-Armenian newspaper editor Hrant Dink’s alleged killers in Istanbul on May 10, according to Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). A witness, whose identity was not revealed, identified three of the defendants as being at the scene of Dink’s fatal shooting outside his newspaper on January 19, 2007. Testifying that the main suspect...

Vedat Kursun, the former editor of Turkey’s only Kurdish-language daily, Azadiya Welat, was on Thursday given a sentence of 166 years and six months in prison by a court in the southeastern city of Diyarbakir, according to Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). Kursun was convicted under articles 314-3 and 220-6 of the criminal code and article 7-2 of the anti-terrorism law on charges of membership of...

Five years ago, on May 13, 2005, Uzbek authorities fired on a crowd in Andijan, in the eastern Ferghana Valley and expelled journalists from the city to prevent them covering the atrocities taking place there. It will always be a black day in the history of human rights violations in Uzbekistan. Uzbek President Islam Karimov rightly continues to appear in the updated list of “Predators of Press...

Azerbaijani authorities illegally confiscated footage and reporting from Norwegian television reporter Erling Borgen and cameraman Dag Inge Dahl on Thursday, according to Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Borgen, who has his own documentary production company, was working with Dahl on a film about freedom of expression in Azerbaijan, focusing on the case of imprisoned journalist Eynulla...

A sweeping new bill in Russia can return censorship rights to Russia’s KGB successor, the Federal Security Service, if passed, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has said. Amendments to the country’s administrative code and the law on FSB activities would give the security agency the right to summon journalists for questioning and demand that editors remove articles that “aid extremists”...

State-owned Internet service provider Kazakhtelecom has blocked access to the independent news portal Respublika and the website of its sister publication Respublika-Delovoye Obozreniye, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Access to both news portals, which often criticise Kazakh authorities for corruption and human rights violations, has been blocked today for all clients of...

Russian journalist Arkady Lander, editor-in-chief of independent newspaper Mestnaya (Local) has been brutally attacked in the southern city of Sochi, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Two unidentified men attacked Lander at his apartment as he returned from a grocery store at around 3 p.m. on Monday, the independent Caucasus region news website Kavkazsky Uzel reported...