Number of journalists in jails decreases worldwide

BAGUIO CITY, Philippines – The number of journalists imprisoned because of their work has slightly decreased worldwide, the New York-based press freedom watchdog Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said as it pointed to China as the “World’s Worst Jailer” for the second year.

China, the CPJ said, is holding 49 journalists behind bars, the highest number ever recorded there.

The number of journalists jailed in Egypt and Turkey also rose dramatically in 2015, even as the number of journalists detained globally declined modestly from the record highs of the past three years, the CPJ said.

Rounding out the Top 10 worst jailers of journalists in 2015 are Iran, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Azerbaijan, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Vietnam.

Eritrea is also tagged “the world’s worst abuser of due process” as no CPJ-listed journalist detained under long-time President Isaias Afwerki has ever been publicly charged with a crime or taken to court for trial. Seventeen journalists are currently behind bars there.

Globally, there were 199 journalists behind bars as of Dec. 1, 2015, the CPJ list said. The list though does not include those released in the year.

For the second year since CPJ began compiling surveys of imprisoned journalists in 1990, not a single journalist in the Americas was imprisoned in relation to work as of Dec. 1.

“The majority of jailed journalists are concentrated in just a handful of countries, including Turkey and Egypt, which have both nearly doubled the number of journalists in jail in the past year,” Joel Simon, executive director of CPJ was quoted as saying.  “The situation highlights that those governments who seek to silence criticism and stifle investigation through the use of prison are global outliers whose abusive practices must be condemned.”

Egypt was holding 23 journalists behind bars compared to 12 in 2014. In Turkey, the number of journalists jailed doubled to 14 over the same period. – With AP