Published on 1 June 2009
29 January 2010 - Journalist ordered to pay damages, retract line about Soviet Union’s disappearance
28 January 2010 - Alternative France-Russia Year to address civil society’s omission from official event
21 January 2010 - 21-month jail sentence for blogger sets dangerous precedent
After eight years as president, Vladimir Putin handed over to Dmitri Medvedev on 2 March 2008 and moved from the Kremlin to the White House and the job of prime minister, having completed the Kremlin’s gradual takeover of the media with the help of his ally, the Gazprom state energy conglomerate. Broadcast media diversity is now just a distant dream and the regional press now works under pressure from presidentially-appointed governors or local business potentates.
Even the most distinguished journalists such as Novaya Gazeta investigative reporter Anna Politkovskaya can be the targets of violence. The trial of four men accused of being accomplices to her murder opened amid great confusion on 19 November 2008. Neither the killer nor those who ordered the murder were among the accused. The same month, a journalist who had criticised a motorway project was beaten nearly to death in a Moscow suburb. Prior to that, in August, the owner of Ingushetia’s sole independent news website, which is highly critical of the local authorities, was arrested and then immediately shot dead by the security forces on his return to the region.
Finally, in November 2008, prosecutors were ordered to step up surveillance of news media that that revealed unwelcome information about the impact of the economic crisis in Russia. When it came to choosing between combating the crisis and combating the media, the government chose the latter.
He is the editor of Erk, the last opposition newspaper in Uzbekistan until it was banned by the authorities in 1993, and he was jailed on 18 August 1999 in the wave of repression after the failed assassination attempt on President Islam Karimov in Tashkent on 16 February 1999.
