Intimidation & Harassment

The Pakistan Press Foundation (PPF) today launched a reporting and monitoring mechanism for election related violence directed against media personnel and institutions. The reporting mechanism will facilitate journalists and other media personnel to report violence directed against them in the month leading up to the General Elections on July 25, to elect members of the national and provincial assemblies. The monitoring system is being established to ensure that election related attacks against media personnel and institutions do not go unnoticed, as well as to monitor the response of the state machinery to such…Read more

This statement was originally published on cpj.org on 18 June 2018. Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni should stop making statements that denigrate and threaten the press, and ensure that his government does not take actions that conflate journalism with terrorism or national security threats, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. On June 11, while attending the funeral of ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) legislator Ibrahim Abiriga, Museveni and NRM Secretary General Justine Kasule Lumumba publicly called for the need to censor radio and social media, according to a report by NTV Uganda. Abiriga…Read more

Pakistani authorities should immediately halt any restrictions on the distribution of Dawn newspaper in Pakistan, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. Distribution of the newspaper has been disrupted in many parts of the country in recent weeks, Dawn editor Zaffar Abbas told CPJ. Pakistan Today reported May 17 that distributors in Balochistan province were told not to distribute the newspaper because it ran an interview with former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif earlier in May in which he made a controversial statement. According to a source who asked to remain anonymous for fear of…Read more

Ugandan authorities must make every effort to secure the safe release of Charles Etukuri, an investigative journalist for the state-owned New Visionnewspaper, the Committee to Protect Journalists said . Five unidentified men dressed in military camouflage seized Etukuri outside the newspaper's office in Kampala on 13 February, days after he published an investigation into the murder of a foreign national in Uganda, the paper's editor John Kakande and the Independent Media Council of Uganda executive secretary, Haruna Kanaabi, told CPJ. Several eyewitnesses, including two New Vision employees, reported that the men were waiting…Read more

Indian authorities on January 5, 2018 filed a criminal complaint against the English-language daily The Tribune and its reporter Rachna Khaira, a day after the paper published Khaira's report exposing a possible vulnerability in the country's vast national identity system, according to news reports. For the article, The Tribune said it paid hackers 500 Indian Rupees (US$8) to buy access to the Aadhar national identity database, which contains personal information of approximately a billion people, and an additional 300 Indian Rupees (US$4.70) for software that would allow the newspaper to receive an identity…Read more

Indian regional police arrested freelance journalist Vinod Verma on October 27, 2017, on claims that he used a sex tape to extort and blackmail a minister from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the Chhattisgarh region-- claims the journalist denies, according to news reports. A committee member from the BJP in Chhattisgarh lodged a complaint against Verma on October 26, alleging an anonymous threat to release objectionable videos of the minister if he did not pay hush money, according to The Indian Express, which quoted unnamed sources from Raipur police in the…Read more