to view in English
للإطلاع على النشرة باللغة العربية
Research By: Wesam Atta
Translated To English By: Aida Saif ElDawla
Violations against the press and media community in Egypt has doubled in the second half of 2015 compared to the first half, when the media freedom program at AFTE recorded 366 violation against journalists and media personnel, with an increase of approximately 112% compared to the first half where we recorded only 172 cases!
The doubling of violations during the second half of the year does not necessarily indicate a drastic change in the environment surrounding the work of journalists, considering the density of events during the second half, foremost parliamentary elections, which extended over two phases in October, November and December had alone 126 violations against the press and the media compared to the first 6 months.
Violations recorded by the program (which do not necessarily reflect all that happened throughout the year, but only what our researchers managed to document) included preventing coverage, illegal detention, obstruction and arbitrariness, confiscation or breaking of equipment or deleting material from equipment, beatings or causing injury, deductions from salaries, arbitrary dismissal, arrest, confiscation and shredding of issues, banning articles, banning from writing, blocking printing of an issue, suspension from work, raiding a press institution, preventing release, raiding homes or altering an article without consent of its author.
This newsletter reviews in detail the violations to which the press and media community have been subjected to and which affected its performance which was protected and guaranteed by the constitution and international conventions, highlighting violations and the parties most affected as well as bodies most encroaching on freedom of the press and the media.
In its second section the newsletter includes a documentation of violations against journalists during coverage of the different stages of parliamentary elections.
Finally, in its third section the newsletter includes a list of journalists in prison as a result of their journalistic work, whether sentenced or in pretrial detention, while clarifying the criteria adopted by the program for inclusion in the list.
