New York, August 2, 2010—Three Uighur-language website managers were sentenced Friday to prison terms of three to 10 years after being found guilty under broad charges of “endangering state security.” The men had been jailed after ethnic rioting in July 2009 in Urumqi, capital of the far-western, predominantly Muslim, Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region.
Nijat Azat, who managed the website Shabnam, was sentenced to a 10-year prison term; Dilixiati Paerhati, whose ran the website Diyarim, was given a five-year term; and the webmaster of Salkin, who goes by the single name Nureli, was sentenced to three years.
The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on the Chinese government to dismiss charges against Gheyret Niyaz, a Uighur journalist and website manager, and release him from prison. According to the Uyghur American Association (UAA), Niyazi will be tried in Urumqi, the capital of China’s far-western Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region on July 28.
As CPJ reported October 2009, Niyaz faces charges of “endangering state security” stemming from ethnic unrest in Xinjiang in July 2009. Niyaz, who had worked for state newspapers Xinjiang Legal News and Xinjiang Economic Daily, also managed and edited the website Uighurbiz until June 2009. Authorities have blamed local and international Uighur sites for fueling the violence between Uighurs and Han Chinese in the predominantly Muslim Xinjiang region.
The denial of service attack on the Foreign Correspondents' Club of China (FCCC) Web site is contributing to an atmosphere in which journalists feel their communication is not secure and their reporting is under threat, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.
The FCCC confirmed in an e-mailed statement today that it has shut down its Web site because of denial-of-service attacks, and that the attacks apparently came from computers within China and in the United States. Denial-of-service attacks can be intentionally generated when many users try to connect to a Web site simultaneously, overwhelming the server that hosts the Web site.
“We do not know who is behind these attacks or what their motivation is,” the FCCC’s statement said.
News reports that the Yahoo e-mail accounts of reporters and others in China and Taiwan have been compromised are a reminder that journalists must be vigilant when communicating over the Internet, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. CPJ called on Internet companies to reassess their business practices in countries where users’ communications cannot be adequately protected.
“Internet companies must seriously weigh the value of doing business in countries that do not provide adequate safeguards.” said Bob Dietz, CPJ Asia program coordinator. “Companies also must increase security for their users to allow them to operate in environments where their information may be at risk.”
New York, March 11, 2010—A state official responsible for media regulation said Wednesday the government should require Chinese journalists to obtain official training to report the news, according to local and international news reports. Domestic journalists already need government-issued identity cards to work in China.
Li Dongdong, deputy director of China’s General Administration of Press and Publications (GAPP), made the comments to a Xinhua News Agency reporter on Wednesday, shortly after a senior editor was removed from his post for co-authoring an editorial criticizing government policies.
