Freedom of the Press Committee Report April 2, 2009

Since the February 24 board meeting, your committee has written letters of protest to the governments of Pakistan, Peru, the Philippines, Iran, Afghanistan, Swaziland, Cuba, Congo, North Korea, China, and Russia.

Since the February 24 board meeting, your committee has written letters of protest to the governments of Pakistan, Peru , the Philippines, Iran, Afghanistan, Swaziland, Cuba, Congo, North Korea, China, and Russia.  Among the highlights:

We urged North Korea’s strongman, Kim Jong Il, to release the two American women journalists who were arrested along the Chinese border for filming activities in North Korea.  The reporters, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, had gone to the border to report for the California-based, Current TV, on refugees from North Korea entering China.  Border guards accused them of crossing illegally into North Korea across the frozen Tumen River, but South Korean journalists said the border guards had themselves crossed into China to arrest the women after they refused to stop filming.  They are now caught up in North Korea’s current round of saber-rattling, including the testing of a long-range missile, which pundits interpret as a bid to capture the new U.S. president’s attention.  Sadly, we do not expect their release until it suits Kim’s purposes.

In a similar case in Iran, Roxana Saberi, an American-born reporter who has lived in Tehran for six years and reported for NPR, the BBC and Fox News, is being held in the notorious Evin prison for working “illegally.”  Her father has told reporters she has done no reporting since her credentials were revoked in 2006, but has been studying and writing personal notes for a prospective book on Iran.  Like Ling’s and Lee’s, her fate seems likely to depend on the course of diplomacy.

We told President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan that we were dismayed by the 20-year sentence given to Sayed Parvez Kambakhsh for “insolence” to Islam.  The Supreme Court upheld the sentence in a hearing that was closed to the public and even to Kambakhsh’s attorney, who could not appear for his client and learned of the verdict only when orders were issued to carry it out.  Kambakhsh was a reporter for Janan-e-Naw in Mazhar-e-Sharif at the time of his arrest.  His crime?  Downloading information from the Internet about women's rights.  The only good thing about this case was that his original death sentence was overturned.  We told Karzai that while we did not want him to interfere with the judicial process, we did hope he would speak out against this gross injustice, and work to bring intellectual freedom and a free press to Afghanistan.

We wrote to Cuba’s president, Raul Castro, on the sixth anniversary of the arbitrary and inhuman imprisonment of a group of seventy five journalists and human rights activists by Cuban authorities.  “This day arrives with no sign your government even hears the world-wide condemnation of Cuba’s repression of basic human rights,” we told him.  “On the contrary, your government continues to harass and jail journalists, for a few days and sometimes much longer, on such ludicrous grounds as being a ‘pre-criminal danger to society.’”