Poison Pens

The Committee to Protect Journalists has issued its annual census. Journalist jailings worldwide have reached their highest totals since the mid 1990's, 179, led by Iran with 42 journalists behind bars. This is a twenty percent increase over last year's figures.

Imprisonments had a modest decline in Europe and Central Asia, where only eight journalists were jailed, the lowest regional tally in six years. But these numbers are swamped by large-scale incarcerations across the Middle East and North Africa, where governments are now holding 77 journalists behind bars, a figure that accounts for approx. 45 percent of the worldwide total.

Here is a census that documents all of the known cases of journalists being jailed. You will notice that both the Israelis and Hamas are offenders.

According to the CPJ website, Eritrea, China, Burma, Vietnam, Syria, and Turkey ranked among the world’s worst countries in regards to jailing journalists. Unconfirmed reports have identified at least six  journalists as having died of mistreatment in custody. Not a single journalist was jailed last year in the Americas.

In a number of countries, authorities have targeted journalists covering marginalized ethnic groups. Nowhere is this more evident than in China, where the government has ruthlessly cracked down on editors and writers who sought to give voice to the nation’s Tibetan and Uighur minority groups. Seventeen of the 27 journalists jailed in China covered oppressed ethnic groups. (Most of the others were online writers expressing dissident political views.) The detainees include Dokru Tsultrim, a monk whose news journal covered Tibetan affairs and who wrote critically about government policies toward Tibetans. Others may languish in China’s prison without coming to the notice of news organizations or advocacy groups. “We know so few of the names of people who have been detained or imprisoned for political crimes,” said John Kamm, chairman of the Dui Hua Foundation, a group that advocates for Chinese political prisoners.

Vietnam is listed as the fifth worse repressor of journalists.

All nine of the Vietnamese journalists behind bars on December 1 were bloggers who covered politically sensitive topics or the affairs of religious minorities. Among the detainees was Pham Minh Hoang, a blogger who wrote about official corruption, environmental degradation, and perceived government foreign policy failures.

The worldwide total is at its highest point since 1996, when CPJ recorded 185 journalists behind bars, a figure driven by Turkey’s suppression of ethnic Kurdish journalists. The increase over the 2010 tally was the biggest single-year jump in a decade.

 At least 78 freelance journalists were in prison worldwide, constituting about 45 percent of the census, a proportion consistent with those seen in the previous two surveys. Freelance journalists can be vulnerable to imprisonment because they often do not have the legal and monetary support that news organizations can provide to staffers.

Antistate charges were the most common charge used to jail journalists. Violations of censorship rules, the second most common charge, were applied in 14 cases.

In 11 cases, governments used a variety of charges unrelated to journalism to retaliate against critical writers, editors, and photojournalists. Such charges range from drug possession to tax evasion. In the cases included in this census, CPJ has determined that the charges were most likely lodged in reprisal for the journalist’s work.

Charges of criminal defamation, reporting “false” news, and engaging in ethnic or religious “insult” constitute the other charges filed against journalists in the census.