CPJ promotes press freedom worldwide and defends the right of journalists to report the news without fear of reprisal.
An appeals court in Nouadhibou today upheld the death sentence for Mauritanian blogger and freelance journalist Mohamed Cheikh Ould Mohamed, who was convicted of apostasy in 2014 for an article he wrote, according to news reports.
Unidentified assailants attacked blogger Nazimuddin Samad with sharp weapons and then fatally shot him in Dhaka Wednesday night, according to news reports.
Samad, a law student, was walking home when at least three assailants killed him, then fled the scene. The 26-year-old blogger had written critically on the social media website Facebook about Islamism and the issue of whether the Bangladeshi constitution should include Islam as a state religion, according to reports.
Islamist militants claimed responsibility for hacking to death at least four bloggers and one publisher in 2015, CPJ research shows. To date, authorities have not convicted anyone for those murders.
Image: Facebook
U.S.-based blogger Wen Yunchao told CPJ today he believes that government officials have detained his parents and brother after two weeks of police questioning the family about his alleged connection to an open letter calling on President Xi Jinping to resign.
Wen, a Chinese blogger and freedom of speech advocate who is based in New York, told CPJ that several unidentified people took his parents and younger brother from their homes in Jiexi county, Guangdong province. “My sister-in-law told me this news [today] and she said she has no idea where my brother and parents are now,” Wen said. Police and officials had visited Wen’s family several times in the past two weeks, questioning them about the blogger’s alleged involvement in the publication and dissemination of the open letter, he said. Wen denies any involvement in the letter, which was published on Wujie News (Watching News)on March 4.
Roy, a Bangladesh-born American, was well known for his writing on science, religion, homosexuality, and freedom of expression in books and on the blog he founded, Mukto-Mona. Roy’s killing on February 26 was followed by the murdersby Islamic extremists of at least three other bloggers and a publisher in Bangladesh last year.
Authorities have made arrests in his murder, but one year on there has been no justice and, as CPJ has documented, the climate for bloggers remains perilous.
The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns two separate attacks in Dhaka on Saturday that, according to reports, killed and injured, respectively, two publishers who had produced books by the murdered Bangladeshi-American publisher Avijit Roy. Two writers were also injured in one of the attacks.
Image: Ashikur Rahman
Avijit Roy, Freelance
February 26, 2015, in Dhaka, Bangladesh
Two unidentified men approached Roy and his wife, Rafida Ahmed Bonna, as they were leaving a book fair in the Dhaka University campus area, according to Bonna and witnesses, the Dhaka Tribune reported. The assailants stabbed and hacked at them with sharp weapons and fled the scene, news reports said. Roy and Bonna were taken to a local hospital, where Roy was pronounced dead, according to news reports. Bonna was critically wounded.
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Bangladesh is #12 on CPJ’s 2015 Impunity Index, which calculates the number of unsolved journalist murders as a percentage of each country’s population. This month CPJ is highlighting cases from each of the 14 countries on the list ahead of the International Day to End Impunity on November 2.
A wave of violence against bloggers has landed Bangladesh back onto the index for the first time since 2011. At least four Bangladeshi bloggers have been hacked to death by apparent Islamic extremists this year alone, and a total of five of Bangladesh’s seven victims of unsolved murders over the last decade are bloggers who criticized religious extremism. Brazen attacks against bloggers like American-Bangladeshi Avijit Roy, who was pulled from a rickshaw by machete-wielding assailants outside a book fair in Dhaka, have been followed by a handful of arrests, but in only one case since 2005, Gautam Das, have the perpetrators been tried and convicted. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and the nominally secular ruling Awami League party have done little to speak out for justice in these crimes, allowing political interests to trump rule of law. One colleague told CPJ, “Authorities seem more concerned with what bloggers are writing than going after their killers.” In the wake of this unchecked terror, several bloggers have fled into exile.
IMPUNITY INDEX RATING: 0.044 unsolved journalist murders per million inhabitants
LAST YEAR: Bangladesh was not on the 2014 index
In September, Vietnamese blogger Ta Phong Tan was released after serving three years of a 10-year prison term and was immediately flown to Los Angeles. InOctober 2014 Tan’s colleague Nguyen Van Hai, whom she co-founded the Free Journalists Club with in 2007 and who was also imprisoned for his work, followed the same route.
In a blog Hai wrote for CPJ a few months after arriving in Los Angeles, he captured perfectly the bitter-sweet nature of his and Tan’s freedom. “As the plane took off, I looked back at my home country, where I had been held in bitter conditions in communist prisons, and where my friends are still seeking freedom for our country. I had just been released from jail and immediately forced into exile in the U.S.,” he wrote.
Singapore blogger jailed for critical Lee Kuan Yew video
Singapore police arrested Amos Yee, a teenage video blogger, according to a statement released by authorities on Monday. According to the government-aligned daily newspaper Straits Times, at least 20 public complaints had been filed to the police since Friday that called for Lee to be investigated.
The complaints were in connection with an eight-minute video Yee posted on YouTube on Friday in which he criticized the policies and political heritage of the late Lee Kuan Yew. The video, called “Lee Kuan Yew is Finally Dead!,” has been taken down from Yee’s YouTube channel, but is available on other channels.
In the video, Yee also compared Lee to Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, and Jesus Christ. News reports citing police said that Yee’s arrest was due to the religious comments, which are tightly restricted by the government.
Image: Youtube
Second blogger hacked to death in Bangladesh
Washiqur Rahman Babu is the second blogger to be hacked to death in public in Bangladesh in the past five weeks.
Three assailants attacked Rahman with a sharp weapon as he left his home to go to work in the morning, The Associated Press reported. The blogger, who was also identified in reports as Oyasiqur Rhaman, was pronounced dead upon arrival at a local hospital from injuries he sustained to his head, face, and neck, news reportssaid. Police were able to identify Rahman using a voter identity card they found in his possession, the reports said.
Image: REUTERS
“The idea that the Internet was at best controlled anarchy and beyond any one nation’s control is fading globally amid determined attempts by more and more governments to tame the web. If innovations like Twitter were hailed as recently as the Arab uprisings as the new public square, governments like those in China, Pakistan, Turkey, Iran and now Russia are making it clear that they can deploy their tanks on virtual squares, too.”
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-Neil MacFarquhar
From the New York Times:
Russia Quietly Tightens Reins on Web With ‘Bloggers Law’