The Committee to Protect Journalist’s 2024 prison census has found that China, Israel, and Myanmar are the world’s top three offenders when it comes to the number of journalists jailed because of their work.
According to CPJ, the primary drivers in 2024 – a year that saw more than 100 new jailings – were ongoing authoritarian repression (China, Myanmar, Vietnam, Belarus, Russia), war (Israel, Russia), and political or economic instability (Egypt, Nicaragua, Bangladesh).
China jailed 50 journalists, Israel imprisoned 43 while the number was pegged at 35 in Myanmar.
The CPJ report noted that Israel rarely appeared in the annual prison census before the 2023 start of the war in Gaza, but it catapulted to second-place last year as it tried to silence coverage from the occupied Palestinian territories. China, Myanmar, Belarus, and Russia routinely rank among the top jailers of journalists, it said.
In Israel, at least 10 journalists were held in the occupied West Bank under a policy of administrative detention, which allows a military commander to detain a person without charge on the grounds of preventing them from committing a future offense.
In Gaza, journalists are also held under the Incarceration of Unlawful Combatants Law, which, like administrative detention, allows Israel to hold detainees for long periods of time without charge and with limited access to legal counsel. According to Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons and detention facilities are subjected to “inhuman conditions” that include “frequent acts of severe, arbitrary violence; sexual assault; humiliation and degradation; [and] deliberate starvation.”
Lawyers who have visited some of the detainees told CPJ that Israeli investigators informed the journalists that they were arrested because they had contacted or interviewed people Israel wanted information about.
‘Bangladesh held 4, India jailed 3’
CPJ said that Asia remained the region with the highest number of journalists behind bars in 2024, accounting for more than 30 percent, or 111, of the global total.
Bangladesh held four journalists seen as supporters of former prime minister Sheikh Hasina, ousted in August last year. Dozens of journalists whose reporting was considered favorable toward Hasina’s government were subsequently targeted in criminal investigations, the CPJ report noted.
India had three journalists in custody, two of them Kashmiris arrested in 2023 against a backdrop of increased incarceration of journalists in the Muslim-majority region after the 2019 repeal of its special autonomy status.
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