Fearless Journalism

"We are living in an age when anti-state charges and 'terrorist' labels have become the preferred means that governments use to intimidate, detain and imprison journalists.
"Criminalizing probing coverage of inconvenient topics violates not only international law, but impedes the right of people around the world to gather, disseminate and receive independent information."
Joel Simon, executive director, Committee to Protect Journalists

The Committee to Protect Journalists has issued new figures, claiming greater numbers of journalists are now incarcerated across the globe.  Turkey, Iran and China, embarked on their own inner conflicts of those critical of government, have brought anti-state charges to intimidate the press.  The group has identified 232 writers, editors and photojournalists alone as of December 1, in incarceration.

Turkey, in its attempts to control Kurdish agitation for a homeland for Kurds, holds over 49 journalists, most of them Kurdish reporters and editors imprisoned on terror-related charges which is what Turkey calls what they identify as anti-government plots.  Penal code statutes are designed to permit Turkish authorities "to conflate the coverage of banned groups and the investigation of sensitive topics with outright terrorism or other anti-state activity".

Iran is held to be second behind Turkey with 45 journalists being kept behind bars.  China is third on the list of the world's current worst-abusers of those who have the effrontery to feel they are serving their public by portraying the reality that Chinese authority finds so irritatingly embarrassing.  According to The Committee to Protect Journalists, China's rulers made "extensive use of anti-state charges to jail online writers who express dissident political views..."

Eritrea, facing multiple UN-imposed sanctions over its support of al-Qaeda-linked jihadists in Somalia currently has 28 journalists in jail, none of them publicly charged or having appeared before a court.  Syria metaphorically and figuratively limps along behind, holding 15 journalists in jail, ostensibly critical of the regime which has turned its military aircraft to use strafing civilian population centres.

And since 2006 when during the height of the Russia/Chechnya conflict, Anna Politkovskaya was murdered in Moscow another several dozen deaths have taken place in Russia, with some internal sources claiming much higher numbers.  This past week journalist Kazbek Gekkiyev, 28, was murdered in Russia's North Caucasus.

The International Federation of Journalists launched an investigation into the deaths of journalists in Russia documenting over three hundred deaths and disappearances since 1993. More recently, Russia's parliament moved to pass a new Internet bill to create a blacklist of websites, aimed at reining in dissent. 

Vietnam, Azerbaijan, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan fill in the top ten countries holding the most journalists in jail, according to the list compiled and released by The Committee to Protect Journalists.  And they all at one time or another sit as respected UN member-states on various UN committees, most notably the UN's Human Rights Council.

Journalism has become an extremely hazardous profession in a world that we are informed has turned increasingly democratic.  A world that, nonetheless, is continually churned in chaos through wars, revolutions and the imposition of the will of tyrants, dictators and autocrats.