Category: Letters to Countries

The OPC joins other international news organizations deeply alarmed by your continued attacks on Yemen’s independent press. We ask that the Yemen government cease and desist in all manner of these attacks.

The OPC joins the IFJ in condemning a court verdict against Daniel Anido, director of the private radio, Cadena SER, and Rodolfo Irago, Cadena’s news director.

For more than seventy years, we have been among the prime watchdogs over the freedom and rights of expression of our international colleagues and we understand the unique complexity of those issues for the Pakistani government at the present moment. However, though ruthless and violent attacks against the media are from militants, the Taliban, or the religious sects in Pakistan, government support of the press has been insufficient, even negligent.

This past year was in many ways a great one for Brazil — a booming economy and then the news that Rio de Janeiro will play host to the 2016 Olympics. Brazil is in a spotlight brighter than ever before, and with that new scrutiny has come heightened awareness of the frequent threats to our colleagues there.

The OPC takes this occasion to express its alarm over what appear to be government-inspired attacks on the press, both physically and verbally.

The OPC would like to endorse the declaration of the Inter-American Press Association that the Communications Law placed before the National Assembly is a clear threat to the freedom of information in Ecuador. Taken at face value, the proposed law might not seem overly threatening. But these measures become extremely dangerous when set in the context of what has been happening to the media in Ecuador.

Once again, a Russian reporter who has angered government officials has died under mysterious circumstances. Once again, the authorities have decided — with no evidence at all, and very little plausibility — that Olga Kotovskaya committed suicide. But this time, after her colleagues insisted that the suicide theory was ridiculous and that she must have been murdered in retaliation for her work, the regional prosecutor has re-considered and opened an investigation into the death. Once again, as so many times in the past, we write to urge the Russian government to expend all possible efforts to make sure the investigation is thorough and transparent.

The members of the Overseas Press Club of America are stunned by the news received today of the massacre of 12 journalists along with more than nine other people in Mangudadatu Province, Mindanao Island. This is an atrocity which demands the swiftest and fullest action by your government to bring the killers to justice.

The OPC is alarmed by the continuing and apparently increasing efforts by Your Excellency’s government to muzzle and intimidate the press in Gabon.

The OPC is in regular contact with petty (and too often not-so-petty) tyrants in countries where an assertive press provokes the irritation of public officials who do not wish to be provoked. You can imagine how disorienting it is, then, to hear a public official in America telling a local news outlet, “I have the right to pick and choose who I want to speak to.” Sherriff, you don’t.