Jailed journalists
Perhaps the international pro-press freedom group Committee to Protec Journalists should include the Philippines in its list of countries with jailed journalists (in an Associated Press article featured in www.truthout.org (of more specifically http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/120607I.shtml) for arresting journalists who covered the recent Manila Peninsula incident.
This will include the Philippines in a lineup of countries notorious for violating human rights like Cuba, Eritrea, Iran and Azerbaijan.
However, there is one democratic country that has jailed two journalists for years now without any charges — the United States.
According to the AP article reprinted in truthout.org:
"Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein, who has been
held by U.S. forces in Iraq for nearly 20 months, and Al-Jazeera cameraman Sami
al-Haj, who has been jailed for five years at the military prison camp in Guantanamo
Bay, Cuba.
Hussein, who was part of a team of AP photographers who shared a Pulitzer Prize
in 2005, was seized by U.S. forces in Iraq in 2006.
The military has declined to provide details of the accusations against him
but has said he had links to insurgent groups in Iraq. The Pentagon recently
said it intends to submit evidence against Hussein to the Iraqi judiciary system
on Dec. 9.
AP executives said they have seen no evidence that Hussein was anything other
than a working journalist.
Al-Haj, who is from Sudan, was detained by military forces in Pakistan in 2002
as he tried to enter Afghanistan to cover the war there. He was turned over
to the U.S. military, which classified him as an enemy combatant and accused
him of transporting money in the 1990s for a charity that provided funding to
Chechen rebels.
Pentagon spokesmen have said in recent interviews with the AP that al-Haj’s
detention had nothing to do with his status as a journalist or the content of
his reporting."
