BEIJING -- With only a year to go before the 2008 Summer Games kick off in Beijing, China is failing to remove press restrictions as it promised when granted hosting rights by the International Olympics Committee, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists said here Tuesday.
Today, 29 journalists are sitting in Chinese jails -- more than any other country in the world -- and more than half of those were imprisoned under vague state security laws, CPJ Asia program coordinator Robert Dietz told a roomful of reporters.
"For this country to be holding journalists in jail during the Olympics makes a travesty of their pledge," Dietz said as he unveiled a 79-page report titled "Falling Short: As the 2008 Olympics Approach, China Falters on Press Freedom."
The IOC expects 2008 to bring as many as 30,000 journalists to Beijing, where television, newspapers and, increasingly, the Internet, are monitored by a ruling Communist party that routinely issues "do not report" orders to local editors and reporters.
Although it is Chinese media outside the country's biggest cities that suffer most from beatings, arrests and censorship, a group of overseas reporters were detained Monday in Beijing after covering a press freedom event hosted by Paris-based nonprofit Reporters Without Borders, CPJ research associate Kristin Jones said.
Today, 29 journalists are sitting in Chinese jails -- more than any other country in the world -- and more than half of those were imprisoned under vague state security laws, CPJ Asia program coordinator Robert Dietz told a roomful of reporters.
"For this country to be holding journalists in jail during the Olympics makes a travesty of their pledge," Dietz said as he unveiled a 79-page report titled "Falling Short: As the 2008 Olympics Approach, China Falters on Press Freedom."
The IOC expects 2008 to bring as many as 30,000 journalists to Beijing, where television, newspapers and, increasingly, the Internet, are monitored by a ruling Communist party that routinely issues "do not report" orders to local editors and reporters.
Although it is Chinese media outside the country's biggest cities that suffer most from beatings, arrests and censorship, a group of overseas reporters were detained Monday in Beijing after covering a press freedom event hosted by Paris-based nonprofit Reporters Without Borders, CPJ research associate Kristin Jones said.
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