Journalists are being imprisoned in record numbers around the world with 262 jailed at the end of last year – the highest number ever recorded by the Committee to Protect Journalists.
In an event held on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York last Friday, Joel Simon, the CPJ’s executive director, said that among those jailed were 73 in Turkey, 41 in China and 20 in Egypt. The meeting heard that about 52 per cent of those jailed were behind bars because of their reporting on human rights violations.
The cases of five journalists were highlighted at the event including those of Reuters journalists Kyaw Soe Oo (also known as Moe Aung) and Wa Lone (also known as Thet Oo Maung) who were sentenced to seven years in jail on charges of violating the country’s Official Secrets Act while reporting on the story of a massacre of Rohingya men by Myanmar’s military in September, last year.
Speaking at the event, world-renowned human rights lawyer, Amal Clooney, said Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo had been paraded into a courtroom for a “sham trial”.
“Their conviction and sentence is a travesty of justice and it is now up to the government to set them free.”
Blogger Alaa Abdelfattah from Egypt and journalist and human rights defender Azimjon Askarov from Kyrgyzstan, who were both arrested while covering alleged human rights abuses by security forces, and photo-journalist Shahidul Alam from Bangladesh, who was imprisoned while covering student protests were also among the five mentioned.
Simon said all five had “sacrificed their liberty to keep their communities and the entire world informed”.
“The jailing of journalists around the world is successfully censoring coverage of key global issues and violating our collective right to seek and receive information vital to public understanding,” he said. “It’s an issue the UN can no longer ignore.”
