“Many local journalists know very little about the domestic laws”, — says Akbarali Sattorov, head of the Tajik Union of Journalists.

This statement was made on 15 July at a thematic round table “The Tajik Code on Administrative Violations in the Media”. The event was organized by the Legal Support Center for the Media and the Tajik National Association of Independent Media (NANSMIT) under support of the Tajik Union of Journalists.

Sattorov stressed the necessity of conducting regular events targeted to improving legal literacy among Tajik media professionals. He promised that his organization will facilitate broadcasting of these events through the Tajik TV companies.

Junaid Ibodov, independent Tajik legal expert says that “the problems of legal illiteracy are typical not only among young journalists, but also among public at large”. He added that “one-time events would hardly alter the situation, and pubic awareness activities should become systematic”.

www.asiaplus.tj

On 2 July, Gulnora Nosirova, a freelance journalist approached the statistical unit of the Tajik Council of Justice with a request about a number of journalists who had to pay penalties for defamation according to court resolutions.

Head of the statistical unit Zaragul Abdukodirzode advised the journalist to approach the State Statistics Committee, having explained that this information is considered a state secrecy, and she is not in the position to make it public. She added that all data on court hearings is submitted by the Council of justice to the State Statistics Committee.

www.nansmit.tj

Speaking at a round table on 2 July in Dushanbe, Akbarali Sattorov, chairman of the Tajik Union of Journalists, said that the media community of Tajikistan is going to approach to the government with an appeal to support the Tajik media in the period of financial crisis. Sattorov also stressed the necessity of creating an anti-crisis journalistic headquarters.

Many newspapers in Khatlon province are published irregularly, mainly on the eve of important national events or celebrations. Most of the printing outlets in Khatlon belong to the government, and the authorities have stopped funding them.

The situation in Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast is similar. For example, the Bomi Jakhon newspaper has not been published since last year.
The round table in Dushanbe was organized by the Tajik Union of Journalists and the NGO “Tajik Assistance Foundation”.

NANSMIT Monitoring Service

Transitions (TOL) is searching for participants in an online course on covering the education beat, developed in cooperation with the Guardian Foundation and the BBC World Trust. The course will be led by Linda Christmas, former journalist at The Guardian and respected journalism trainer.

Interested applicants should be from Central and Eastern Europe, Southeastern Europe, and the former Soviet Union. They should have at least two years of journalistic experience, either already covering the education beat or hoping to. In some exceptional cases, education professionals, such as teachers, who are interested in branching out and writing about education will be considered. The course will feature three online modules, each with a lesson plan and interactive questionnaire:
1) Specialist Reporting
2) Reporting education
3) Interviewing Children Participants in the online course will be required to complete each module.

They will also be asked to write one news story and one feature on education-related topics. The trainer will provide supervision at all stages of the course, as well as detailed feedback on the articles. The best articles will be published on the TOL website www.tol.organd their authors will be paid a writer’s fee. The course will run 13 July to 2 August. Participants will write two short assignments (one education news story and one feature story) and will be expected to meet their deadlines. Late assignments will not be accepted. The most successful participants will be invited to Prague for a fall workshop on covering education with all expenses paid by the organizers.

Linda Christmas began her journalistic career as a writer on education with The Times Educational Supplement. She worked for more than a decade with The Guardian and left to write two books. She then ran a post-graduate course for newspaper journalists at London’s City University and is now Senior Adviser to the Guardian Foundation. For the last two years she has been training journalists in the Arab world.

How do I apply?To apply, fill out the online APPLICATION FORM: http://forms.tol.cz/form/37/You should submit your application as soon as possible but no later than Wednesday, July 8. Successful applicants will be contacted by email. For any questions, please contact TOL’s Kristy Ironside at ironsidek@tol.org, with «Online Training» in the subject line. TOL’s program for education journalists is sponsored by the Open Society Institute with the contribution of the Education Support Program (ESP). The ESP aims to facilitate change in education and national policy development in line with the Soros foundation network’s mission of promoting open society.

www.tol.cz

Administration of the Central Library in the city of Kulyab decided to provide local journalists with free access to the Internet.

Abdurakhim Azimov, director of the library told the NANSMIT monitoring service that this decision has been made out of big respect to media professionals. The library is located in downtown area; it is very convenient for journalists to come and check their mail, and to send their reports and stories to editors.

The library administration has made its Internet facilities commercial, which allows it to cover some maintenance expenditures and take good care of its own personnel.

NANSMIT Monitoring Service

On 19 June the Russian-Tajik Slavic University hosted a presentation of a textbook on ecological journalism

The Tajik non-governmental organization “Nature Protection Team” and the Regional Ecological Center organized the presentation of the textbook within the framework of the VII Central Asian Festival of Ecological Journalism. In 2007 the Nature Protection Team jointly with the Russian-Tajik Slavic University launched an educational program titled “The role of young journalists in nature protection”.

The purpose of the program is development of youth ecological journalism in Tajikistan. The project resulted in master classes on ecological journalism, ecological site visits, meetings and discussions with environmental experts, and presentations of best literary works compiled in the first textbook.
In Autumn Dushanbe will be hosting the grand finale of the VII Central Asian Festival of Ecological Journalism.

http://www.khovar.tj/

On 26 June the Tajik Union of Journalists will be hosting a round table “The periodical oriented to readers: design and contents”.

Organizers of the event – the Tajik Union of Journalists and Internews Network, Tajikistan – have invited Dmitri Surin, chief editor of the newspaper association “My District” from Moscow, Russia as a moderator.

Tajik editors and publishers will discuss the issues of design and contents of newspapers in contemporary World. Participants will be shown best practices and design samples in the printing industry.

Representatives of Internews Network, Tajikistan told the Asia Plus news agency that the event is being organized within the framework of the program “Innovations and development of multimedia editing boards”. The main purposes of this program are to improve quality of information and ensure access to mass media applying tools of online journalism; to strengthen relations between the media and public at large; and to improve communication between editors and correspondents using the Internet.

http://www.asiaplus.tj/

The independent school of journalism “Tajikistan – XXI Century” is selecting students for the second noncommercial training course for young media professionals.

The courses are being implemented within the framework of the project “Strengthening professional skills among young journalists” supported by the UNESCO International Program on Development of Communication (IPDC) and the US Embassy’s Democracy Development Commission. Sixty practicing journalists aged from 18 to 30 will take part in the second part of the program.

Training sessions will be conducted twice a week on the following subjects: “Printing Media”, “Radio” and “Television” under the guidance of leading Tajik media professionals.

The duration of the courses is three months (from 1 September to 30 November), after which the most successful students will have a chance to pass internship in the leading Tajik media and editing boards.

Applications are accepted until 30 August 2009.

Tajikistan – XXI Century

Obama administration refines 43-year-old law

Washington — The 43-year-old Freedom of Information Act is considered a bulwark of democracy by scholars, journalists and common citizens seeking information held by the U.S. government.

The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), enacted in 1966 and refined over the years, allows individuals and organizations (including non-U.S. citizens and groups) to request access to unpublished documents held by the executive branch of the federal government without having to provide a reason for the request.

When FOIA first was enacted, it was considered revolutionary. Only Finland and Sweden had similar legislation. Since then, about 80 nations have created similar laws, says Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, a leading U.S. research institute that collects and publishes information gathered through FOIA requests.

President Lyndon Johnson was not enthusiastic about signing the act requiring the executive branch of the U.S. government to make many documents available upon request by the public. Many officials felt the transparency called for by FOIA would constrain them from communicating sensitive information in documents, thereby hampering government functions.

Since its inception, FOIA has become a popular tool of inquiry for journalists, scholars, businesses, lawyers, consumers and environmental groups. It has helped bring openness to the workings of government.

Areas of information that are exempt for release under FOIA include: personal privacy information, certain classified national defense and foreign relations matters, and trade and business secrets. The law does not apply to the two other branches of the U.S. government — the judicial (federal courts) and legislative (Congress) — or states. Individual states have their own FOIA-type laws that cover state government information.

In 1996, FOIA went digital when Congress revised the law to provide for public access to information in electronic form. Federal agencies provide information online on how to make requests for documents.

On his second day in office, January 21, President Obama instructed the Department of Justice to further enhance accessibility of information to the public. Attorney General Eric Holder, whose department oversees the handling and administration of FOIA requests among federal agencies, issued a set of guidelines on March 19 implementing Obama’s order.

Calling Obama’s directive “a sea change in the way transparency is viewed across the government,” Holder said FOIA “reflects our nation’s fundamental commitment to open government” and the new guidelines are “meant to underscore that commitment and to ensure that it is realized in practice.”

The new guidelines, which apply to all executive branch agencies, include a requirement that when responding to an information request, agencies should ask: “What can I release?” An agency should not withhold information simply because it is technically allowed to do so.

The guidelines also call for:

• Releasing records in part when they cannot be released in full.

• Ensuring discretionary release of documents when possible.

• Working cooperatively with requests and responding promptly.

• Better reporting by agency FOIA personnel to the Department of Justice.

The new guidelines aim to make the FOIA process more efficient and quicker. In 2006, the 30 federal agencies with the largest volume of requests reported receiving more than 774,000 requests for access to information under FOIA.

FREEDOM OF INFORMATION OVERSEAS

Other nations have seen firsthand the impact of greater government transparency through FOIA-type laws.

The United Kingdom’s Freedom of Information Act, passed in 2000 but only implemented over the past few years, recently helped American freelance journalist Heather Brooke expose a government scandal. The journalist, who lives and works in the United Kingdom, used her experience as an investigative reporter in the United States to make FOIA requests on the expense claims of members of Parliament.

Brooke’s request kicked off a vigorous debate in the House of Commons on whether the governing Labour Party could get an exemption for expense claims under the new law.

A major British newspaper, the Daily Telegraph, gained access to some of the information and wrote a series of stories identifying 80 members of Parliament as alleged abusers of government expense accounts. The findings led to the resignation of the speaker of the House of Commons.

China is also experiencing greater government transparency after it recently promulgated its Regulations on the Disclosure of Government Information. The year-old law has resulted in more openness, an example being the Ministry of Finance’s decision to publish the government’s 2009 budget on the Internet on March 20. More environmental information has been released to the Chinese public over the past year.

Like its U.S. counterpart, the new Chinese FOIA also mandates that government agencies issue an annual public report on their progress in disclosing information to the public.

Источник: U.S. Embassy, Dushanbe

Pulod Umarov, former editor of the Tong newspaper and his two accomplices –Surayo Umarova, former accountant of this newspaper, and Dodojon Kasymov, an entrepreneur, are adjudged guilty by the Khujand city court. The criminals are charged for document forgery.

The Khujand city court convicted the criminals to two years in prison according to Article 340 Part two of the Tajik Criminal Code (forgery). However, on the basis of Article 71 of the Tajik Criminal Code, the court assumed a decision to transform the punishment into conditional sentence.

NANSMIT Monitoring Service