More than three quarters of the 99 journalists and media workers killed worldwide in 2023 died in the Israel-Gaza war, the majority of them Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza. The conflict claimed the lives of more journalists in three months than have ever been killed in a single country over an entire year.
Investigating the circumstances of these war-related deaths – which also included three Lebanese and two Israeli journalists – was particularly challenging, not only because of the large number of deaths in a short time, but also because of the loss of those who could have provided more information. Many journalist victims’ families were killed along with them in Gaza, their colleagues died or fled, and Israeli military authorities adamantly deny targeting journalists or provide only scant information when they acknowledge press killings. Critical information about their lives and work may have been lost forever. (See more about our methodology for documenting journalist deaths here and here.)
The 2023 global total – the highest since 2015 and an almost 44% increase on 2022’s figures – includes a record number of journalist killings – 78 – that CPJ research determined were work-related, with eight more still under investigation. Thirteen media workers also were killed last year.
How CPJ’s methodology has been used in the Israel-Gaza war
Interactive map: Attacks on the Press in 2023
Once the deaths in Gaza, Israel, and Lebanon are excluded, killings dropped markedly compared to 2022, when CPJ documented a total of 69 deaths, 43 of which were work-related. Outside of the deaths in the Israel-Gaza war, 22 journalists and media workers were killed worldwide in 2023. CPJ’s research confirmed that 13 of those deaths were work-related; the circumstances around the remaining deaths are still being investigated. In the 18 other nations where journalists were killed in 2023, CPJ documented one to two deaths in each.
However, the declining number is not an indication that journalism has become safer in other parts of the world. Indeed, CPJ’s annual prison census found that 2023 jailings of journalists – another key indicator of conditions for journalists and press freedom – remain close to record highs established in 2022.
Divisive elections, rising authoritarianism, ongoing conflicts, and powerful and expanding organized crime networks create conditions that continue to put journalists in peril. In some nations, these threats have become entrenched, resulting in the killings of at least one journalist a year for decades.
Targeted killings of journalists in direct reprisal for their work, which CPJ classifies as murder, also persisted in 2023, with CPJ recording journalist murders in nine countries around the world.
In Mexico, where corruption and organized crime have long made it especially hard to determine whether a journalist’s killing was work-related, the country’s overall number of deaths fell from a record of 13 in 2022 to two in 2023. Nonetheless, journalists continued to face attacks, harassment, threats, and abduction, with a soon-to-be-published joint report by Amnesty International Mexico and CPJ finding that Mexico “has remained one of the world’s deadliest countries for journalists.”
Ukraine’s wartime decrease in journalist killings, from 13 work-related deaths in 2022 to two in 2023, may be due to factors such as improved training and safety awareness, Ukrainian authorities’ introduction of stricter accreditation rules for frontline work, and the stabilization of combat zones. Nevertheless journalists in Ukraine remain at great risk and early 2024 has already seen missile strikes that have injured journalists and attacks that may be targeted.
And while killings in regions outside the Middle East have mostly dropped, the death rate in sub-Saharan Africa has held steady, with six journalists killed per year since 2021. These totals include both deaths deemed to be work-related and killings still under investigation.
Classification changes
CPJ researchers take extensive steps to confirm information from a minimum of two sources about every casualty listed in our database. Their first step is to determine that the victim met our definition of a journalist – someone who covered news or commented on public affairs through any medium – by reviewing examples of their previous work. Our next step is to investigate whether the journalist’s death was work-related, by speaking to as many colleagues, family members, supervisors, and friends as possible to verify the backgrounds and affiliations of those killed and the likely motives for their deaths. Determining these circumstances can take months or years – especially in war zones – and we routinely update our database if we obtain new information. Since we began recording journalist casualties at the start of the Israel-Gaza war, we’ve made the following changes to the initial entries in our database:
CPJ has removed two Palestinians from its list of work-related casualties: one who was reported as dead but later was found alive, and another whose family later clarified that he was not a journalist or media support worker. We also removed the names of two Israeli journalists who were among the scores killed when Hamas attacked a music festival in Israel on October 7 after their outlets told CPJ they were not assigned to report on the festival. (CPJ’s global database of killed journalists includes only those who have been killed in connection with their work or where there is still some doubt that their death was work-related.)
As CPJ and other organizations investigate the cause of death for journalists, they may determine that those journalists were deliberately targeted for their work. CPJ classified as murder the 2023 killing of Reuters videographer Issam Abdallah and is investigating evidence indicating that the IDF targeted around a dozen others.
Targeted killings of journalists in direct reprisal for their work, which CPJ classifies as murder, persisted in 2023, with cases recorded in nine countries.
Almost all of the journalists killed in the Israel-Gaza war were Palestinian, and CPJ has raised concerns about the deliberate targeting of members of the media by the Israeli military.
Cases include that of Issam Abdallah, a Lebanese visual journalist for Reuters. Independent investigations by international news organizations and rights groups found evidence indicating that Israeli forces targeted a group of reporters – killing Abdallah and injuring six others – in southern Lebanon on October 13. The journalists, all wearing press insignia, were covering border crossfire between the Israel Defense Forces and pro-Hamas militants from Lebanon’s Hezbollah group in the days after Israel responded to Hamas’ deadly October 7 incursion by launching devastating retaliatory strikes on Gaza. The investigations found that Abdallah’s group was reporting from a location where no fighting was taking place when they were hit by two Israeli shells.
In January 2024, journalists Hamza Al Dahdouh and Mustafa Thuraya were killed in what Israel acknowledged was a targeted attack on a car in which they were traveling. It accused Al Dahdouh, who worked for Al-Jazeera, and freelancer Thuraya of being members of terrorist groups – a charge strongly denied by Al-Jazeera and the men’s family and colleagues. In CPJ’s May 2023 report “Deadly Pattern,” CPJ noted several cases in which journalists killed by Israeli forces were accused of being terrorists and in which no credible evidence was ever produced.
CPJ, along with other organizations, is now investigating whether a dozen other journalists – and, in some cases, members of their families – killed in the Israel-Gaza war also were targeted by the Israeli military. These cases include Al-Jazeera cameraperson Samer Abu Daqqa, who bled to death after Israeli authorities blocked efforts to evacuate him. The probes into these killings are taking place against the backdrop of the “Deadly Pattern” report, which found that members of the Israel Defense Forces had killed at least 20 journalists over the past 22 years and that no one had ever been charged or held accountable for their deaths.
Elsewhere, targeting of journalists remains a constant in countries like the Philippines, Mexico, and Somalia, which have had a historically high rate of journalist murders. From 1992 to 2023, 94 of the 96 journalists killed for their work in the Philippines were murdered; 61 of 64 work-related killings in Mexico were murders, as were 48 of 73 in Somalia. Notably, overall deaths of journalists in these countries occurred at a consistent rate: at least one journalist per year was killed for close to two decades or more.
In the Philippines, radio journalists in particular are vulnerable as radio remains an influential platform. Cresenciano “Cris” Bundoquin, a radio journalist covering local politics, was shot at least five times by two assailants on a motorcycle as he was opening a store he owned.
In Somalia, the number of killed journalists is lower than the peaks CPJ recorded between 2009 and 2013, but impunity remains high and government efforts to bring the murderers of journalists to justice do not seem to extend beyond rhetoric. Elsewhere in Africa, deaths in Cameroon saw an uptick in 2023, with at least two journalists, Martinez Zogo and Jean-Jacques Ola Bebe, murdered in the midst of a succession battle for power and state resources between factions of ailing President Paul Biya’s government.
An ominous statistic underpins journalist killings in Mexico, which has consistently ranked as one of the world’s deadliest countries for reporters. While only two killings with unconfirmed motives were documented in 2023, the nation has the most missing journalists in the world, with 16 still unaccounted for – many after a decade or more.
Justice is unlikely for the journalist victims of targeted murders. CPJ’s 2023 Impunity Index report found that of the nearly 1,000 murders CPJ has recorded since it began collecting data in 1992, a total of 757 – more than 79% – have gone wholly unprosecuted.
CPJ independently investigates every journalist death to determine whether they were killed in relation to their work. In the usual course of an investigation, researchers interview family, friends, colleagues, and authorities to learn as much as possible about a journalist’s work and the circumstances of each killing. As noted above, this was particularly challenging given the high number of killings in such a short period in Gaza and the lack of independent access to the territory.
Beyond the Israel-Gaza war, other forces hampered CPJ’s efforts to tell the whole story around journalists’ deaths in 2023. Among the eight who CPJ could not confirm were killed in connection with their work, lack of information from police and government officials, sometimes fueled by pressure from corrupt and criminal actors, keeps these deaths shrouded in mystery. These deaths include:
Even if a journalist is deemed to have been killed for their work, details about their cases may be difficult to obtain. Because almost all of those categorized as having been killed in relation to their work – 77 out of 78 in 2023 – were local journalists, often covering crime, conflict, and corruption in their communities, their deaths rarely attract international attention, and pressure on their families and colleagues to stay silent can stymie the quest for justice. Because the powerful – whether in government or in criminal organizations – often seek to bury these investigations, the cases of many journalists killed years ago remain unsolved.
CPJ research has shown dangers remain for journalists, even in countries where the number of killings declined in 2023.
Mexico provides an important case in point as to why journalist killings can drop, but conditions can remain just as dangerous. Although the number of killings in Mexico dipped significantly, from 13 in 2022 to two in 2023 (including both work-related deaths and those where the motive was still being investigated), there were no new government policies or societal shifts to explain a decline that may have been a statistical outlier. (While several other journalists were killed in Mexico in 2023, CPJ did not include them in its database after finding their deaths were unrelated to their profession.)
What is clear about Mexico is that there were a large number of non-lethal attacks in 2023, in line with numbers in previous years, and the intention in some cases may have been to kill. Journalists continued to face harassment and threats from organized crime members and public officials, with systemic impunity facilitating these attacks. Mexican government agencies spy on reporters and rights defenders and a significant number of journalists have had to leave their homes, and abandon their professions, due to violence.
Haiti also saw journalist killings decrease in 2023, but the country remains plagued by violence and instability, with an increase in physical attacks by police and gangs in the last two years, and with crimes committed against journalists highly likely to go unpunished.
The threats to journalists can be expected to continue in 2024 as conflicts persist, impunity remains systemic, and a record number of high-stakes elections are held around the world.
CPJ’s database of killed journalists is divided into two main categories: “confirmed” and “unconfirmed.” Deaths are classified as “confirmed” when the evidence indicates a journalist was killed in connection with their work, unconfirmed when there is insufficient information to determine the motive for the killing.
Since Russia’s full-scale assault on Ukraine in February 2022, CPJ has documented all war-zone journalists – whose deaths and journalistic credentials we are able to verify – as “confirmed” to be working whether they were at home or in the field – an assumption based on the fact that technological advances allow them to work from anywhere – unless it can be definitively proven otherwise.
Confirmed deaths fall into three sub-categories: targeted murders in reprisal for reporting work, deaths in combat zones or crossfire, and deaths on dangerous assignments. CPJ also records the killings of media support workers, such as translators, drivers, and security guards.
CPJ continues to investigate unconfirmed killings where possible and changes classifications when new information becomes available. (Read more about how we gather and classify our data)
CPJ’s research and documentation covers all journalists, defined as individuals involved in news-gathering activity. This definition covers those working for a broad range of publicly and privately funded news outlets, as well as freelancers. In the cases CPJ has documented, multiple sources have found no evidence to date that any journalist was engaged in militant activity.
Kathy Jones is the deputy editorial director at the Committee to Protect Journalists. For more than two decades, she has helped shape and tell stories with data, reporting and visuals for news organizations including Reuters, Bloomberg, and Newsweek.
]]>Israel emerged as one of the world’s leading jailers of journalists following the October 7 start of the Israel-Gaza war, the Committee to Protect Journalists’ 2023 prison census has found. Israel ranked sixth – tied with Iran – behind China, Myanmar, Belarus, Russia, and Vietnam, respectively.
Overall, CPJ documented 320 journalists behind bars on the census date of December 1, 2023. The number was the second-highest recorded by CPJ since the census began in 1992 – a disturbing barometer of entrenched authoritarianism and the vitriol of governments determined to smother independent voices. Some governments go a step further, using transnational repression to threaten and harass reporters beyond their own borders. Moscow’s intimidatory actions included a spate of arrest warrants for Russian journalists living in other countries; Ethiopia forced the return of an exiled journalist to face terrorism charges after having him arrested in neighboring Djibouti.
CPJ’s research also shows that more than half – 168 – listed in the census face false news and anti-state charges such as terrorism in retaliation for their critical coverage.
In 66 cases, those held have not yet been told of the charges they are facing. They often face gratuitously cruel conditions, due process is frequently subverted as authorities prolong pre-charge and pre-trial detention of journalists, and journalists’ lawyers themselves face retaliation around the world.
Feature: Palestinian journalists imprisoned by Israel in record numbers
Video: Misusing and abusing the law
Interactive map: Attacks on the Press
Other key findings from 2023:
China (44 behind bars), Myanmar (43), and Belarus (28) held more than a third (35.8%) of those incarcerated on the day of the census.
China has long ranked as one of the world’s worst jailers of journalists. Censorship makes the exact number of journalists jailed there notoriously difficult to determine, but Beijing’s media crackdown has widened in recent years, with 2021 marking the first time journalists from Hong Kong were in jail at the time of CPJ’s census. The Hong Kong arrests came after Beijing imposed a harsh national security law following mass pro-democracy protests. Several of the journalists held at the time face ongoing delays in their cases, including Jimmy Lai, founder of the now-shuttered pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily. Lai’s national security trial only started after he’d spent nearly 1,100 days behind bars. If convicted, he could be jailed for life.
Chinese authorities are also ramping up the use of anti-state charges to hold journalists, with three out of the five new China cases in CPJ’s 2023 database consisting of journalists accused of espionage, inciting separatism, or subverting state power. Many journalists charged are ethnic Uighurs from Xinjiang, where Beijing has been accused of crimes against humanity for its mass detentions and harsh repression of the region’s mostly Muslim ethnic groups. In 2023, 19 of the 44 imprisoned were Uighur journalists.
Repression of journalists has also worsened dramatically in Myanmar and Belarus since 2021.
In Myanmar, the country’s independent media have been devastated since the February 2021 military coup, when the junta moved swiftly to arrest journalists, shut news outlets, and force journalists into exile. Almost three years later, journalists continue to be targeted under an anti-state provision broadly used to criminalize “incitement” and “false news.” In May, photojournalist Sai Zaw Thaike was arrested while covering the aftermath of the deadly Cyclone Mocha in western Myanmar and was later sentenced to 20 years in prison for sedition – the longest known prison penalty given to a reporter since the coup.
In Belarus, authorities have jailed an increasing number of journalists for their work since 2020, when the country was wracked by mass protests over the disputed reelection of Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko. The majority – 71% – face anti-state charges; almost half are serving sentences of five years or more.
Belarusian authorities use “extremism” laws as their most common weapons to jail journalists in retaliation for their work, with five out of the seven new Belarus prisoners in CPJ’s 2023 census accused of creating or participating in extremist groups, or facilitating extremist activities. (CPJ is also investigating whether another Belarusian journalist is facing similar charges.) According to the exiled Belarusian Association of Journalists, at least 19 media outlets were labeled as “extremist” over the last two years.
Two key changes in the 2023 census listings are Israel and Iran, where each is recorded as holding at least 17 journalists on December 1, tying in sixth place.
Israel has appeared several times on CPJ’s annual census, but this is the highest number of arrests of Palestinian journalists since CPJ began documenting arrests in 1992 and the first time Israel has ranked among the top six offenders. All those known to be held by Israel as of CPJ’s December 1 census date were arrested in the Palestinian territory of the occupied West Bank after the start of the Israel-Gaza war on October 7. Most are held in administrative detention, which allows Israeli authorities to hold detainees without charge on the grounds that they suspect the detainee of planning to commit a future offense.
The closed nature of these procedures has made it difficult for CPJ’s researchers to learn of any accusations facing the journalists, but several families told CPJ they believed that they were jailed for social media postings. (Read more about Israel’s imprisonment of Palestinian journalists here.)
Overall, Israel has detained more than 20 journalists since the war began, but those released before December 1 or held after that date are not included in the 2023 census. (See here for CPJ’s most recent figures on the number of journalists in custody.)
Iran’s numbers saw a sharp decline from its 2022 designation as the worst jailer of journalists following its clampdown on coverage of nationwide women-led protests sparked by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini. Many of the 62 journalists listed on the 2022 census have since been released on bail to await charges or sentencing, meaning that the lower number incarcerated in 2023 in no way signals any letting up in Iran’s repression of the media.
Instead, authorities have responded to the uptick in reporting on women’s rights by singling out prominent female journalists to make an example of them.
As of December 1, 8 of the 17 journalists jailed in Iran were women.
They include Niloofar Hamedi and Elahe Mohammadi, among the first journalists to report on Amini’s death in September 2022. Sentenced to serve 13- and 12-years respectively on anti-state charges linked to their reporting, the two women were allowed to leave prison on bail on January 14, 2024 – after almost 16 months behind bars — while Iran’s Supreme Court considers their appeal. Freelance journalist Vida Rabbani is in Evin prison serving the first of two sentences totaling 17 years for her protest coverage.
Russia also intensified its efforts to suppress free reporting. With the country’s independent media gutted following its full scale February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Moscow is trying to criminalize journalism beyond its borders by issuing arrest warrants and prison sentences in absentia for several prominent journalists working in exile.
Russia also holds a disproportionate number of foreign reporters in its jails. Twelve of the census’ global total of 17 non-local imprisoned journalists are held by Russia. Two, Evan Gershkovich and Alsu Kurmasheva, are U.S. citizens in pre-trial detention. The 10 from Ukraine include five Crimean Tatars, a predominantly Muslim ethnic group indigenous to the Crimean peninsula, which was annexed by Russia in 2014, four of whom are serving sentences of 12 to 19 years on charges of terrorism. One, Amet Suleymanov, suffers from multiple health issues, including heart, lungs, stomach, and joint problems.
Prison conditions are harsh in the nations with the worst track records of detaining journalists. Country reports released by the U.S. Department of State in early 2023 found that prisoners in China, Myanmar, Belarus, Russia, and Vietnam typically faced physical and sexual abuse, overcrowding, food and water shortages, and inadequate medical care.
At least 94 of the 320 journalists in the 2023 census – almost 30% – are known to have health problems. Many cannot get medications or access to doctors but their families are often reluctant to speak out for fear of reprisal against their relatives. CPJ’s research found numerous instances where jailed journalists were denied healthcare, medicine, and sometimes basic necessities like heat, hot water and electricity.
Vietnamese journalist Huynh Thuc Vy, for example, is serving two years and nine months for allegedly defacing Vietnam’s flag. Her father, Huynh Ngoc Tuan, told CPJ in November 2023 that Vy had developed tricuspid valve regurgitation, a serious heart condition, that required medication that the prison would not provide and her family could not afford to buy and get regularly delivered to the prison more than 120 miles from their home.
Also in Vietnam, prison officials stopped providing hot water to Tran Hunyh Duy Thuc to prevent him from preparing instant noodles purchased in the prison cafeteria. Thuc, who is serving a 16-year prison sentence, to be followed by five years’ house arrest, for “activities aimed at overthrowing the government,” has staged frequent hunger strikes against poor prison conditions and had stopped eating prison food last September as part of a protest against unfair food rationing.
Thuc’s family members say that he developed an eye ailment in 2017 after prison officials routinely cut electricity to his dark cell and refused to deliver him battery-powered flashlights provided by his family on the grounds that electronic devices are banned for prisoners.
In Russia, Ukrainian freelance journalist Iryna Danylovych, who is serving a prison sentence of six years and 11 months, is denied medical treatment in spite of having lost hearing in her left ear and suffering from debilitating headaches. “Irina is on the verge of a breakdown,” Danylovych’s father told CPJ.
In Belarus, Ksenia Lutskina also does not receive appropriate medical care in spite of suffering from a brain tumor that has grown while she serves an eight-year sentence.
Many journalists face curbs on their freedom even after they’ve served their time. This not only affects their livelihoods, but allows repressive governments to continue silencing their voices.
In Russia, for example, Andrey Novashov is banned from working as a journalist for a year after serving his eight-month sentence of correctional labor. Aleksandr Valov, who was released in March 2023 after serving a full six-year sentence, has to check in with the police every week and remains under “administrative monitoring.” He also is restricted from leaving the Black Sea city of Sochi for two years and, while not formally banned from working as a journalist, he told CPJ nobody wanted to give a job to a known government critic.
In Vietnam, five journalists – Doan Kien Giang, Truong Chau Huu Danh, Nguyen Phouc Trung Bao, Le The Thang, and Nguyen Thanh Nha – from the now-defunct independent Bao Sach (Clean Newspaper) Facebook-based news outlet – were banned from working as journalists for three years after serving their sentences on anti-state charges.
In Iran, Nasim Soltanbeygi, who reported on Amini’s death, was sentenced to a two-year ban on leaving the country and a two-year ban on joining a political group or assembly in addition to her 3.5 year sentence for spreading propaganda against the system and colluding against national security.
In China, where prisoners are sent to political re-education camps or kept in prison after their sentences end, the fate of a group of students who worked for Ilham Tohti, the jailed-for-life founder of Xinjiang news website Uighurbiz, remains unknown.
Egypt, too, has a history of limiting journalists’ activities after they’ve served their sentences. Egyptian photojournalist and CPJ International Press Freedom Awardee Mahmoud Abou Zeid, known as Shawkan, was banned from international travel for five years after being released from prison in 2019.
Inevitably, a snapshot recording the number of journalists in prison on a given day reflects only part of the picture. Rankings can be rollercoasters, and a lower number of incarcerated reporters does not indicate more tolerance for press freedom. Cases in point include countries with “revolving door” policies like Turkey, Egypt, Iran, and Syria.
Eritrea, with 16 journalists in jail, is the world’s seventh-worst jailer of journalists and the worst on the African continent. Those held in Eritrea include some of the longest known cases of journalists imprisoned around the world; none has ever been charged.
In sub-Saharan Africa, the number of journalists jailed on December 1 rose to 47 from 31 in 2022 and 30 in 2021, with Ethiopia (8) and Cameroon (6) ranking as the second- and third-worst in the region.
The number of jailed Ethiopian journalists reflects the difficult environment for the media. Despite the signing in 2022 of a peace agreement that ended two years of civil war, parts of Ethiopia remain restive and conflict is raging in the country’s Amhara State between regional militia and federal forces. All eight journalists in CPJ’s census were arrested in 2023 after covering this conflict.
The data also reflects media crackdowns in Senegal, Zambia, Angola, and Madagascar. Senegal, which has five journalists jailed, has only appeared on the census twice previously (2008 and 2022) with one jailed journalist in each of those years.
The Democratic Republic of Congo, Zambia, Angola, Burundi, and Nigeria, all had one journalist listed in 2023. Madagascar, appearing for the first time on the census, also held one journalist. The charges brought against DRC’s Stanis Bujakera Tshiamala – a combined application of the penal code and a new digital code and press law enabling authorities to prosecute and imprison journalists for sharing “false news” and for sharing information electronically – underscored concerns about the ongoing criminalization of journalism.
Asia remains the region with the highest number of journalists in jail. Outside of the leading jailers of China, Myanmar, and Vietnam, journalists were also behind bars in India, Afghanistan, and the Philippines.
India, which holds seven journalists, has used security laws including the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) and the Jammu and Kashmir Public Safety Act to silence the media. (repetition) Afghanistan had one journalist in prison as of December, but the Taliban’s crackdown on Afghan journalists and media has not eased. There were at least 16 other journalists arrested – and later released – throughout the year, with the Taliban accusing some of them of reporting for exiled media.
In the Philippines, the media environment under President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. remains harsh, but overall journalists have seen less overt antagonism than under his predecessor, with Frenchie Mae Cumpio remaining as the one journalist in prison in the Southeast Asian country, which was once a regional bastion of press freedom. Cumpio has been behind bars for nearly four years on what her lawyers call trumped-up illegal arms and terror finance charges.
Tajikistan continues to be the top jailer of journalists in Central Asia, with seven journalists serving prison sentences of between seven and 20 years – all of them convicted since late 2022. A CPJ visit to the country in late 2023 found that the harsh sentences have exacerbated a pervasive climate of fear and self-censorship among journalists in a media environment already decimated by years of government pressure.
In late 2023, the press freedom situation also deteriorated rapidly in Azerbaijan, with a wave of journalist detentions ahead of presidential elections due in February 2024. Four journalists and a media worker were detained before December 1, and at least three others since then. Four held on December 1 were from prominent investigative outlet Abzas Media – known for its corruption investigations into senior state officials – and were arrested amid a decline in Azerbaijani-Western relations following Azerbaijan’s military recapture of Nagorno-Karabakh, with Azerbaijani authorities accusing U.S. and European embassies and donor organizations of funding the outlet illegally.
Turkey’s 13 imprisoned journalists marks a sharp decrease from the 40 documented in CPJ’s 2022 census, but the world’s longest-imprisoned female journalist, Hatice Duman, remains behind bars serving a life sentence and her retrial did not bring any change in 2023. Also, many journalists released in 2023 are still under judicial control, which means they must report to police and may be banned from foreign travel, or free pending investigations or trials. CPJ’s two fact-finding visits to Turkey in late 2023 found that the lower number of journalists in detention does not reflect an improvement in the press freedom environment in the country.
Egypt, routinely among the world’s worst jailers, tied with Turkey for the eighth-highest number of jailed journalists globally – 13 – in the 2023 census. Saudi Arabia was ninth, with 10 journalists behind bars.
Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Iraqi Kurdistan have all expanded the use of false news, terrorism, and anti-state charges against journalists in recent years. Egyptian authorities regularly work around legislation limiting prisoners’ pretrial detention to two years by filing additional charges to extend that period. Cases in point: freelancer Mohamed Said Fahmy, has spent more than four and a half years in pretrial detention after being arrested on false news and terrorism charges in 2018. He was scheduled for release in 2020 and 2021, but his detention was extended after prosecutors added further charges. Mostafa Mohamed Saad, a senior cameraman for Qatari broadcasting network Al-Jazeera, has been held in pretrial detention in Cairo on terrorism and false news charges since 2019.
No new jailings were reported from Bahrain and Syria, which still held five journalists each in 2023, or from Morocco and Algeria, which each held three. Iraq’s four jailed journalists included one new prisoner in Iraqi Kurdistan. In Tunisia, Khalifa Guesmi was taken into custody in September to serve a five-year prison sentence on charges of disclosing national security information. Earlier in the year, an appeals court had increased his sentence from one to five years.
The relatively low numbers of journalists jailed in Latin America and the Caribbean – one each in Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Cuba – belie the threats to media in a region where other countries, notably Honduras and El Salvador, continue to undermine press freedom and where numerous journalists have been forced into exile.
In Guatemala, a pattern of anti-press attacks has attempted to censor and silence independent and investigative outlets. José Rubén Zamora remains in prison even after a Guatemalan court overturned his June 2023 conviction on money laundering and ordered a retrial, scheduled for February 2024. Zamora has been forced to change lawyers eight times since being jailed in July 2022, with four of his lawyers facing criminal charges in apparent retribution for defending him in court. Government pressure forced the shutdown of his independent newspaper, elPeriódico, in May 2023.
In Nicaragua, freelance reporter Victor Ticay is serving eight years in prison on anti-state and false news charges – accusations that fit a pattern of legal harassment, intimidation, and criminal charges against independent journalists in Nicaragua as President Daniel Ortega’ has escalated efforts to stifle free expression.
Arlene Getz is editorial director of the Committee to Protect Journalists. Now based in New York, she has reported from Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East as a foreign correspondent, editor, and editorial executive for Newsweek. Prior to joining CPJ, she spent nine years at Reuters, where she was the editor in charge of the service’s global Commentary section.
Editor’s note: Numbers for each prison census are adjusted yearly as CPJ learns of arrests, releases, or deaths in prison. The numbers for CPJ’s 2022 census have been revised from 363 to 367 in accordance with this policy. For the most recent data, see cpj.org/data/imprisoned/
The prison census accounts only for journalists in government custody and does not include those who have disappeared or are held captive by non-state actors. These cases are classified as “missing” or “abducted.”
CPJ defines journalists as people who cover the news or comment on public affairs in any media, including print, photographs, radio, television, and online. In its annual prison census, CPJ includes only those journalists who it has confirmed have been imprisoned in relation to their work.
CPJ’s list is a snapshot of those incarcerated at 12:01 a.m. on December 1, 2023. It does not include the many journalists imprisoned and released throughout the year; accounts of those cases can be found at http://cpj.org. Journalists remain on CPJ’s list until the organization determines with reasonable certainty that they have been released or have died in custody.
Database reporting by Samir Alsharif, Anna Brakha, Beh Lih Yi, Joan Chirwa, Shawn Crispin, Doja Daoud, Ignacio Delgado Culebras, Sonali Dhawan, Geralda Embalo, Natalie Gryvnyak, Iris Hsu, Nick Lewis, Kunal Majumder, Mohamed Mandour, Sherif Mansour, Scott Mayemba, Muthoki Mumo, Moussa Ngom, Ozgur Ogret, Angela Quintal, Jonathan Rozen, Gulnoza Said, Soran Rashid, Waliullah Rahmani, Yegi Rezaian, Dánae Vilchez, Cristina Zahar
Editing of prisoner profiles by Arlene Getz, Kathy Jones, Naomi Zeveloff, Katy Migiro, Sarah Spicer, Jennifer Dunham, Suzannah Gonzales, and Tom Barkley
]]>Crisis-hit Haiti has emerged as one of the countries where murderers of journalists are most likely to go free, the Committee to Protect Journalists’ 2023 Global Impunity Index has found. A devastating combination of gang violence, chronic poverty, political instability, and a dysfunctional judiciary are behind the Caribbean country’s first inclusion on CPJ’s annual list of nations where killers get away with murder.
Haiti now ranks as the world’s third-worst impunity offender, behind Syria and Somalia respectively. Somalia, along with Iraq, Mexico, the Philippines, Pakistan, and India, have been on the index every year since its inception. Syria, South Sudan, Afghanistan, and Brazil also have been there for years – a sobering reminder of the persistent and pernicious nature of impunity.
The reasons for these countries’ failure to prosecute journalists’ killers range from conflict to corruption, insurgency to inadequate law enforcement, and lack of political interest in punishing those willing to kill independent journalists. These states include democracies and autocracies, nations in turmoil and those with stable governments. Some are emerging from years of war, but a slowdown of hostilities has not ended their persecution of journalists. And as impunity becomes entrenched, it signals an indifference likely to embolden future killers and shrink independent reporting as alarmed journalists either flee their countries, dial back on their reporting, or leave the profession entirely.
This year’s index documents 261 journalists murdered in connection with their work between September 1, 2013 – the year the United Nations declared November 2 as the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes Against Journalists – and August 31, 2023. It finds that during this 10-year period, no-one has been held to account in 204 – more than 78% – of these cases.
(Journalists killed in the Israel-Hamas war that began on October 7 are not included here because their deaths fall outside of the 10-year index period.)
A 78% impunity rate is a slight improvement on the 90% rate CPJ recorded a decade ago. But it should not be seen as reason for optimism. Impunity remains rampant and the stark reality is that nearly four out of every five killers of journalists are still getting away with murder.
Overall, CPJ has recorded the murders of 956 journalists in connection with their work since it began tracking them in 1992. A total of 757 – more than 79%– have gone wholly unprosecuted.
CPJ’s impunity index includes countries with at least five unsolved murders during a 10-year span. Only cases involving full impunity are listed; those where some have been convicted, but other suspects remain free – partial impunity – are not. Each country’s ranking is calculated as a proportion of their population size, meaning more populous countries like Mexico and India are lower on the list, in spite of having a higher number of journalist murders.
But the pernicious effects of impunity extend beyond the countries that have become fixtures on CPJ’s annual index. Unpunished murders have an intimidating effect on local journalists everywhere, corroding press freedom and shrinking public-interest reporting.
In the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Palestinian journalists interviewed by CPJ for the “Deadly Pattern” report published earlier this year said their coverage had been undermined by escalating fears for their safety after the Israel Defense Forces fatally shot Al-Jazeera Arabic correspondent Shireen Abu Akleh in May 2022. CPJ’s investigation found that no-one had been held accountable for the deaths of 20 journalists by Israeli military fire in 22 years. “The impunity in these cases has severely undermined the freedom of the press, leaving the rights of journalists in precarity,” noted the report. (Israel is not listed in the impunity index because fewer than five journalists killed during the index period are classified as having been targeted for murder.)
In several countries in the European Union, typically considered the safest places for journalists, press freedom has come under increasing pressure, with journalist murders remaining unsolved in Malta, Slovakia, Greece, and the Netherlands.
In Malta and Slovakia, full justice in the killings of Daphne Caruana Galizia and Ján Kuciak is yet to be achieved. Greece has yet to hold anyone accountable for the 2010 killing of Sokratis Giolias, with a recent report by “ A Safer World for the Truth” – a collaboration of rights groups that includes CPJ – finding gaps in authorities’ investigations into the murder of Giolias and the similar killing of Giorgos Karaivaz 11 years later.
The stark reality is that nearly four out of every five killers of journalists are still getting away with murder.
In the Netherlands, nine suspects are awaiting trial for the fatal shooting of Dutch reporter Peter R. de Vries as he left a TV studio in 2021. While it remains unclear whether De Vries and Karaivaz were targeted because of their work, colleagues in Greece and Holland have told CPJ their deaths have left lingering insecurity and self-censorship in the media community. De Vries’ death had “a chilling effect on journalists,” Dutch crime reporter Paul Vugts – the Netherlands’ first journalist to receive full police protection because of work-related death threats – told CPJ.
In countries considered less safe for journalists, violent retaliation for their coverage also continues.
In the central African nation of Cameroon, the mutilated corpse of journalist Martinez Zogo was found on January 22, 2023. At least one other journalist with ties to Zogo, Jean-Jacques Ola Bebe, was found dead 12 days later. Several journalists warned by Zogo that they too were on a hit list have fled the country; others opted for self-censorship. “The killing, physical attacks, abduction, torture, and harassment of journalists by Cameroonian police, intelligence agencies, military, and non-state actors continue to have a severe chilling effect [on the media],” noted a July report submitted to the United Nations by a group that included CPJ.
Since 1992, full justice has only been achieved for 47 murdered journalists – fewer than 5%. CPJ’s data shows that factors like international pressure, universal jurisdiction, and changes in government can play instrumental roles in securing that punishment.
One landmark case: Peruvian journalist Hugo Bustíos Saavedra. Bustios was killed in an army ambush on November 24, 1988, while covering the conflict between government forces and Shining Path guerrillas. It took almost 35 years for a Peruvian criminal court to sentence Daniel Urresti Elera, then the army’s intelligence chief in the zone where Bustios was killed, to 12 years in prison for his part in the killing. (Explore a timeline of the Bustios case here.)
Urresti’s conviction resulted from a combination of changing internal politics in Peruvian leadership, the re-opening of investigations into human rights cases after Peru’s Supreme Court effectively struck down the 1995 amnesty law protecting military officers, and ongoing advocacy by rights groups – including CPJ – at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
In the Central African Republic, the August death of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Russian private mercenary group killed in a plane crash two months after ordering his troops to march on Moscow, has led to hopes that those with information about the 2018 murders of three Russian journalists might come forward, writes CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia Program Coordinator Gulnoza Said. The journalists, Orkhan Dzhemal, Kirill Radchenko and Aleksandr Rastorguyev, were shot dead three days after arriving in the country to investigate Wagner’s activities there.
Unpunished murders have an intimidating effect on local journalists everywhere, corroding press freedom and shrinking public-interest reporting.
Universal jurisdiction, which allows a country to prosecute crimes against humanity regardless of where they were committed, can also be an effective tool. Bai Lowe, accused of being a member of the “Junglers” death squad that killed Gambian journalist Deyda Hydara, is on trial in Germany – the first person accused of human rights violations during the dictatorship of Yahya Jammeh to be tried outside Gambia.
International pressure is another factor that may prompt authorities to investigate unsolved killers – even if the probes don’t necessarily lead to prosecution. CPJ’s “Deadly Pattern report about journalists killed by the Israeli military found that authorities were more likely to investigate killings of journalists with foreign passports. “The degree to which Israel investigates, or claims to investigate, journalist killings appears to be related to external pressure,” noted the report.
The Bustios case may have offered a glimmer of hope. But it also underscores that the road to justice can be long and tortuous – and for the vast majority of murdered journalists, it never comes at all.
1) Syria
Fourteen journalists were murdered with full impunity in Syria during the 2023 index period. Ten died between 2013 and 2016, as the initial uprising against the Bashar al-Assad regime widened into a full-scale war involving regional and global powers and the militant Islamic State (IS) began seizing control of Syrian territory. IS is believed to have murdered eight of the 10 killed between 2013 and 2016. Fighting has eased since Assad regained control of most of the country, but Syrian media have been dealt a hard blow as numerous journalists fled into exile and military authorities continue to harass, threaten or detain journalists.
2) Somalia
The worst offender on the index for the last eight years, Somalia dropped below Syria in the 2023 index. This drop to second does not signal an improvement in Somalia’s impunity record, but instead arises from the method used to calculate the rankings: Three of the four journalists murdered in 2013 were killed before September 1 of that year, meaning they fall outside of this year’s index period. Most of the 11 journalists during the index period died between 2013 and 2018, believed to have been killed by Al-Shabaab, an insurgent group which seeks to establish an Islamic state in Somalia. Somalia remains unstable amid a renewed offensive against Al-Shabaab. Covering the insurgent group remains a dangerous, even deadly, assignment. The media are severely hampered in their reporting as journalists continue to face arrests, threats, and harassment.
3) Haiti
Haiti’s entry into the index follows the unsolved murders of six journalists since 2019. Five were killed in 2022 and 2023, among the hundreds of Haitians killed by the criminal gangs that have taken over large parts of Haiti as the country struggles to deal with an economic crisis aggravated by a series of natural disasters and the political void following the 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse. Haitian journalists have also been kidnapped and forced to flee their homes amid fears that their work put them at greater risk than other civilians. (Read more about conditions in Haiti here.)
4) South Sudan
The five journalists murdered in South Sudan all died when unidentified gunmen ambushed an official convoy in Western Bahr al Ghazal state on January 25, 2015. South Sudan’s media have long been under pressure in a country plagued by civil war and human rights violations since gaining independence in 2011. CPJ has documented numerous instances of harassment, detention, jailing and the death of a war reporter in crossfire in recent years.
5) Afghanistan
The militant Islamic State has claimed responsibility for killing 13 of the 18 journalists murdered in Afghanistan in the last decade. Ten died in 2018 alone, nine of them in a double suicide bomb attack in Kabul on April 30 that year, and one shot dead the previous week in Kandahar. While the deadly targeting of reporters appears to have slowed since the Taliban returned to office in 2021, large numbers of journalists have fled the country and the group’s escalating repression forced has gutted the country’s once-vibrant media landscape.
6) Iraq
CPJ has not documented any journalists murdered for their work in Iraq since 2017. Fourteen of the 17 listed in CPJ’s database were killed in 2013 and 2015 amid a resurgence of sectarian violence. While the violence has eased, media restrictions and threats against journalists – especially in Iraqi Kurdistan – continue.
7) Mexico
Killings of journalists in Mexico have dropped from last year’s high, but the country remains one of the world’s most dangerous for journalists. Seventeen of the 23 journalists murdered during the index period are believed to have been killed by criminal fire. CPJ has found that the high levels of violence against journalists can be attributed in part to the failure of state and federal authorities to make the environment safer for reporters or even take crimes against the press seriously.
8) Philippines
The Philippines remains a dangerous place to work as a reporter, especially for radio journalists. While Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has adopted a more conciliatory approach toward the media since becoming president in June 2022, CPJ reported that a culture of self-censorship persists and Marcos’ change in tone has not yet been accompanied by substantive actions to undo the damage wrought to press freedom under the Rodrigo Duterte administration. Twenty journalists have been murdered in the Philippines since September 2013; three since Marcos took office.
9) Myanmar
The number of journalists murdered with impunity in Myanmar remains at five, with no new cases documented this year. The country was listed for the first time in 2022, the same year the country’s military junta jailed dozens of journalists and used broad anti-state laws to quash independent reporting in the wake of its coup in February 2021.
10) Brazil
Brazil is working to reestablish good relations with the media following Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s defeat of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro in 2022, with the government introducing measures like an Observatory on Violence Against Journalists earlier this year. Brazil did not record any new journalist murders in 2023, but the killers – mostly believed to be criminal groups – of 11 journalists murdered in Brazil during the index period remain at large. The 2022 murders of British journalist Dom Phillips and Indigenous issues expert Bruno Pereira in the Amazon continue to underscore the dangers faced by environmental reporters in the region.
11) Pakistan
Pakistan, one of the countries that has appeared on the index every year since its inception, recorded eight journalists killed with impunity during this year’s index period. Four are believed to have been killed by criminals, two by political groups. CPJ has documented numerous press freedom violations in the country following the ouster of former Prime Minister Imran Khan in April 2022.
12) India
India too has appeared on CPJ’s impunity index every year since 2008. The majority of the 19 murdered since September 2013 are believed to have been killed by criminals over reporting on topics ranging from environmental issues to local politics, but journalists are facing increasing pressure ahead of the country’s 2024 election. In addition to detentions, police raids and blocks of news websites, authorities are using a counterterrorism law against the media.
Arlene Getz is editorial director of the Committee to Protect Journalists. Now based in New York, she has worked in Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East as a foreign correspondent, editor, and editorial executive for Reuters, CNN, and Newsweek. Follow her on LinkedIn.
CPJ’s Global Impunity Index calculates the number of unsolved journalist murders as a percentage of each country’s population. For this index, CPJ examined journalist murders that occurred between September 1, 2013, and August 31, 2023, and remain unsolved. Only those nations with five or more unsolved cases are included on the index. CPJ defines murder as the targeted killing of a journalist, whether premeditated or spontaneous, in direct reprisal for the journalist’s work. This index does not include cases of journalists killed in combat zones or while on dangerous assignments, such as coverage of protests that turn violent. Cases are considered unsolved when no convictions have been obtained, even if suspects have been identified and are in custody. Cases in which some but not all suspects have been convicted are classified as partial impunity. Cases in which the suspected perpetrators were killed during apprehension also are categorized as partial impunity. The index only tallies murders that have been carried out with complete impunity. It does not include those for which partial justice has been achieved. Population data from the World Bank’s 2022 World Development Indicators, viewed in October 2023, were used in calculating each country’s rating.
]]>Published June 28, 2023
Two journalists forced to flee due to death threats in a single month; explosive devices mailed to multiple broadcasters; reporters compelled to be accompanied by law enforcement in order to cover violent areas; and entire communities turned into so-called “silent zones,” where the press is intimidated from working. Developments like these portend a grim outlook for press freedom in Ecuador, a country facing a spike in violence against journalists amid a security crisis with no precedent in recent history. The situation is compounded by political turbulence as President Guillermo Lasso, a conservative former banker who took office in 2021, dissolved the National Assembly in May as it moved to impeach him over corruption allegations, which he denied.
Ecuadorian journalists and activists worry that a “perfect storm” is gathering to imperil press freedom in this South American nation. In a recent report, Ecuadorian press freedom group Fundamedios documented 356 attacks on the press in 2022, the highest number since 2018, in an increasingly hostile environment. In the first four months of 2023, the organization reported a total of 96 attacks.
While Lasso took steps to protect the media, additional factors have exacerbated an already volatile situation. The legacy of former President Rafael Correa, who ruled from 2007 to 2017, has caused lasting damage to journalism in Ecuador. The lingering effects of Correa’s anti-press actions, which included filing defamation lawsuits, enacting restrictive measures, and smearing critics, have weakened the media’s ability to report the news, local journalists told CPJ during a recent visit to the capital of Quito. “We are stigmatized, and can’t identify ourselves without being reviled,” said Cristóbal Peñafiel, president of the National Journalists Union. “The press is still a target. Confrontation has been normalized and we are the enemies,” said Francisco Rocha, director of the Ecuadorian Association of Newspaper Publishers (AEDEP).
Correa’s smear campaigns and troll warfare — the former president is still lashing out at his critics on Twitter, according to a recent report by Fundamedios — have had a pile-on effect on private media already financially weakened by the COVID-19 pandemic. A report from the journalist group Fundación Periodistas sin Cadenas (Journalists Without Chains Foundation) showed that from March 2020 to November 2021, the Ministry of Labor listed a total of 22,948 layoffs by companies in the media and communications sector.
Various Ecuadorian newspapers have been forced to close their print editions and several suspended payment to their employees as financial troubles multiplied, Fundamedios reported. The leading Guayaquil-based daily El Universo was among those struggling to survive, laying off 150 employees since the start of the pandemic. “COVID-19 accelerated our digital transformation,” said owner Carlos Pérez Barriga. “The collapse of the business model based on advertising forced us to adapt to this hasty process of change. Today, without a doubt, we have less capacity to cover what’s going on in the city streets.”
According to news site Primicias, criminal violence in Ecuador resulted in the deaths of some 4,603 people in 2022 — an increase of 82.5% over the year prior. The country is a “rising hotspot for organized crime,” said think tank and media organization InSight Crime, citing the country’s “diverse transnational criminal landscape, dominated mainly by Colombian criminal and guerrilla groups as well as Mexican cartels.” Albanian traffickers have also set up a foothold in the country, moving tons of cocaine to Europe.
Various local gangs — including the Choneros and affiliated group the Chone Killers, as well as the Lobos, Tiguerones, and Lagartos — have capitalized on rising crime and violence to expand control over activities including the drug trade and illegal mining. Amid an increasing global demand for drugs, gangs have bolstered dealings with major international criminal networks by working as distributors moving cocaine from neighboring countries through Ecuador’s ports toward Europe and the United States, InSight Crime said.
According to El Universo, Ecuadorian authorities confiscated over 200 tons of drugs in 2022, 90% of which was cocaine. While the amount is a slight decrease from the previous year’s record of 210 tons, it is well above the 128 tons seized in 2020 and the 82 tons seized in 2019, according to InSight Crime.
Arturo Torres, founder and editor of the investigative website Código Vidrio, has covered the evolution of organized crime in the country for more than two decades. “Years of flawed decisions, the lack of understanding about the magnitude of the problem, authorities’ inaction, collusion between criminals and officials, the fact that Ecuador is located between two cocaine-producing countries [Peru and Colombia], and the huge increase in the demand of drugs after the pandemic are all factors that contributed to worsening the problem,” Torres told CPJ in a phone interview.
Torres, who also writes for Primicias, said that journalists have had to take increasing safety precautions when reporting on organized crime. In April, he published a bylined report about an alleged criminal gang leader. The next day a lawyer representing the person named in the article called Torres and urged him to remove the story from the website. Torres refused to do so and alerted the police and other contacts about the call. He did not hear anything further but decided that he would no longer use his byline when publishing information that could put him at risk.
Other journalists on the beat have been less fortunate. In August 2022, Gerardo Delgado Olmedo, who covered crime on a Facebook-based news outlet he founded called Ola Manta TV, was shot to death by two gunmen while he was in his car waiting at a traffic light on the outskirts of the Pacific Coast city of Manta. In April, the killers were sentenced to 34 years and six months in prison while prosecutors continue to investigate to find the mastermind and the motive, according to news reports. Also last year, reporters Mike Cabrera and César Vivanco were killed, and Fernando León disappeared, according to Fundamedios. No one has been arrested for Cabrera and Vivanco’s deaths. (CPJ has been unable to confirm whether the three killings were connected to the journalists’ work, but the deaths inevitably have had a chilling effect on their colleagues.)
Prison violence is another risky beat. Most murders in Ecuador are the result of internal strife among criminal groups competing to control the distribution and export of cocaine, the International Crisis Group said. Often, these rivalries play out behind bars; since 2021, violent clashes have left hundreds of inmates dead, according to news reports.
In March, Karol Noroña, a reporter for the independent Quito-based news website GK, reported on the attempted murder of the warden of the women’s prison in Guayaquil and conducted interviews with inmates on the high rate of homicides inside prisons. On May 24, she met with a source who told her that a drug trafficking gang leader had threatened to kill her over her work. Within 24 hours, Noroña fled Ecuador. “The plan is for her to stay outside the country until her safe return is guaranteed,” Isabela Ponce, GK’s editorial director, told CPJ at the time.
A few weeks later, another journalist, who asked to remain anonymous for security reasons, fled the country following repeated death threats, according to a statement by Fundación Periodistas sin Cadenas. The threats were brought to the attention of the attorney general’s office, the Interior Ministry, and Lasso’s office several months earlier, the group said. The attorney general’s office told CPJ it has opened investigations into the threats, but they have yielded no results.
The soaring crime rates have had a direct impact on the news business. With journalists self-censoring in fear of physical retribution, entire communities across Ecuador are increasingly left without information on the main issues affecting their daily lives, local journalists and advocates told CPJ.
An investigative report published in May by Fundación Periodistas sin Cadenas claims that the country is facing one of the worst periods in history for press freedom. The foundation describes a situation where “silencing and self-censorship have increased due to escalating widespread violence.” Investigative journalism “is becoming a constant struggle.”
The report examines press conditions in 10 Ecuadorian provinces: Carchi, Chimborazo, Cotopaxi, Esmeraldas, Guayas, Loja, Los Ríos, Manabí, Pichincha, and Santo Domingo de los Tsáchilas. The organization found that organized crime and local political forces have imperiled the media in vast parts of Ecuador, taking advantage of its vulnerability, precarious labor conditions, and lack of security.
Women journalists in particular face a disturbing level of violence. “They are victims of various forms of harassment and violence from their sources, managers, or even from civil society itself in the context of social protests,” according to the foundation.
The situation in the northern coastal province of Esmeraldas, on the border with Colombia, is the most obvious example of how attacks against the press can foster a culture of censorship. The 2018 murders of reporter Javier Ortega, photojournalist Paúl Rivas, and driver Efraín Segarra, who worked for El Comercio, after being kidnapped by a dissident group that used to be part of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), sent shockwaves across the Ecuadorian media. In 2021, a Colombian court sentenced two men to nearly 29 years in prison each for their involvement in the killings. The victims’ families have continued to call authorities to identify and punish the mastermind and planners.
“It is a turning point that marked the beginning of this rising wave of attacks against the press,” said Torres. Since then, murder attempts, threats, and intimidation have cowed the media into silence in a region where organized crime groups exert control. “Turning a blind eye” and deciding not to report on criminal activities has been the only option for local journalists to survive in Esmeraldas, an investigation by Fundación Periodistas sin Cadenas showed.
In the current context, sensitive topics related to criminal activities, including drug trafficking and illegal mining — which has now reached isolated spots of the Amazon — go unreported. And those who dare to break the silence face consequences.
Francisco Rodríguez, a Chilean national who lived in Ecuador for more than two decades, is a tour operator, environmental activist, and citizen journalist who commented on environmental damage and government inaction in the gold-rich Napo province on Twitter and in the media. In late January, he survived a shooting attack, and in March he received a series of death threats, he told CPJ from a safe refuge. Rodríguez fled the country in April following advice from local authorities. He said he filed a complaint with the state attorney’s office, but the investigation did not produce any results. Rodríguez said he can no longer live in Ecuador and has returned to Chile.
Large urban areas have also seen recent attacks against the press. In mid-March, letter bombs with USB drives and threatening messages were sent from the central town of Quinsaloma to the TV stations Ecuavisa, Teleamazonas, and TC Television; the radio station EXA FM; and to one independent news commentator, all based in Quito or Guayaquil. One journalist sustained slight injuries after one of the devices exploded.
The Ecuadorian government understands the scale of the problem, and has declared numerous states of emergency since 2021, according to Americas Quarterly. In April, the government took the controversial step of authorizing civilian gun use for personal defense. That month the country also declared organized crime groups as “terrorists,” a designation that grants the military powers to combat gangs without declaring a state of emergency.
In spite of these steps, the government’s response appears to be hampered by political gridlock. Lasso’s decision to trigger a constitutional “muerte cruzada” (crossed death) clause dissolving the National Assembly allows him to rule by decree for up to six months. On August 20, Ecuador is set to hold elections, and, if a runoff is necessary, a new president and National Assembly members will be sworn in at the end of November. Those authorities will serve until May 2025, when Lasso’s term was set to conclude, The Associated Press reported. While Lasso can run in the election, he told The Washington Post that he will support another candidate.
In an interview with CNN en Español, Lasso said his decision to dissolve the National Assembly was aimed at deterring “a macabre plan to take control of state institutions in order to promote impunity and facilitate the return of a former president [Correa] who has been convicted of corruption by the National Court of Justice.”
Correa, who was sentenced to eight years prison in absentia for corruption in 2020, has lived in exile in Belgium, which granted him political asylum, since 2017. (In 2022, Belgium, his wife’s home country, rejected an extradition request.) The former president is still popular in Ecuador, and his Citizen Revolution party was the biggest in the National Assembly before parliament was dissolved, according to Reuters.
While Correa is ineligible to run for president due to his conviction, political analysts and journalists told CPJ that if a Correa ally comes to power, that individual could pave the way for the ex-president’s eventual political return with a pardon. In the meantime, Correa has been encouraged by his party’s big electoral win in the February municipal elections. He told Reuters the party will “rebuild” Ecuador if it succeeds in the upcoming snap elections.
With Ecuador’s future leadership an open question, people in the country are increasingly distrustful of authorities’ ability to cope with crime and violence. A recent Gallup poll showed that the population’s confidence in local law enforcement and their belief in the judiciary are at the lowest level the country has seen in more than 10 years. In 2022, 41% of Ecuadorians expressed confidence in their police force, and even fewer (24%) were confident in the judiciary.
Shortly after taking office in 2021, Lasso proposed a new law to replace Correa’s most anti-press legislation, the Organic Law of Communication. Known as the “gag law,” it had institutionalized repressive mechanisms, established state regulation of editorial content, and given authorities the power to impose arbitrary sanctions and censor the press. Lasso’s immediate predecessor, Lenín Moreno, had already scrapped some of the worst provisions. After Correa’s allies in the National Assembly inserted restrictions, Lasso vetoed that version of the bill. In November, he finally signed a new version, which limits state interference with media, guarantees freedom of speech on social networks, and outlines protections for reporters at risk.
Local journalists told CPJ that they feel their ability to criticize those in power without being persecuted has changed drastically since Correa left office. They said that they feel that the Lasso government generally respects their work, despite the government’s incensed reaction towards La Posta, a news outlet that posts its journalism only on social media platforms. In early January, La Posta reported on an alleged influence peddling scheme within state-owned companies involving Lasso’s brother-in-law, which led the National Assembly to conduct an inquiry. In a televised address, Lasso lambasted the reporters working for the outlet, calling them “media terrorists.” La Posta said that its reporters were harassed and intimidated. In a statement, Fundamedios condemned the government’s reaction, stating that it “recalls a dark time for freedom of expression.”
In late April, CPJ traveled to Quito to meet with Lasso to discuss the deteriorating press freedom conditions and the impact of the public safety crisis on journalists throughout the country. Lasso was not able to attend the meeting due to illness, but a CPJ delegation met with Sebastián Corral, the government’s secretary of the administration. He agreed that the security crisis impacts the media, calling it the government’s top priority, but argued that it affects all Ecuadorians.
During the meeting, Corral agreed to a series of executive measures to support the work of the press. He said that the government will provide critical funds to an existing mechanism to protect journalists, as well as additional funding to support the attorney general in efforts to protect the press and new initiatives to combat misinformation. Corral also pledged to work with local organizations in speeding up the process to implement the new communications law. CPJ hailed these commitments as a positive step toward improving journalist safety.
CPJ also met with Attorney General Diana Salazar Méndez. Ecuadorian journalists and press freedom advocates have criticized her for what they describe as a lack of timely and rigorous investigations into the numerous attacks against members of the media.
During the meeting at her office overlooking downtown Quito, Salazar described a security crisis “without precedent” and said her office strongly supports the work of the press. Salazar conceded that systems to protect victims and witnesses have limitations and need an infusion of “extraordinary resources” to operate more effectively. When pressed about the lack of successful prosecutions in cases of threats and attacks against the press, she said journalists want immediate answers, but judicial investigations take time. She also said some journalists had not cooperated with investigations into threats against them.
Despite the gravity of the crisis, there is a lack of international attention on Ecuador. While the Biden administration has insisted that Lasso is one of United States’ staunchest allies, in April several members of the U.S. Congress sent Biden a letter calling on him to “re-evaluate” close relations with the Ecuadorian government and to take a closer look at the corruption allegations surrounding Lasso’s presidency.
“The situation in Ecuador deserves to be debated at the regional level,” said Diego Cazar Baquero, founding member of Fundación Periodistas sin Cadenas and editor of the online publication La Barra Espaciadora.
GK’s Ponce told CPJ that the unprecedented crisis requires journalists and the media to build “support networks to safeguard the lives of journalists” working under threat. Ponce added that the press “must incorporate a culture of safety and become much more aware about what’s going on in this situation.”
“Ecuador has become a key puzzle piece for organized crime and shouldn’t be neglected. Institutions are being destroyed while the Amazon region is at grave risk,” said Cazar. Usually eclipsed by countries with heavier regional political weight, Ecuador and its problems have often been overlooked by the international community. “Our country is not collateral and should be the focus of global attention,” Cazar said.
Ecuadorian journalists and advocates are increasingly uneasy about the mounting problems facing local journalism in a climate of violence, fear, and intimidation that has fostered a culture of self-censorship. On top of that, recent memories of Correa’s damaging legacy are creating even more anxiety as the country waits to see if his party will succeed in the upcoming snap elections.
Journalists in particular are bracing for impact.
The Committee to Protect Journalists makes the following recommendations:
To the Ecuadorian executive branch
To Ecuadorian judicial, administrative, and law enforcement authorities
To the international community
Published May 9, 2023
Introduction
Interactive map
Main findings:
–Israel discounts evidence and witness claims
–Israeli forces have failed to respect press insignia
–Israeli officials respond by pushing false narratives
–Journalists are accused of terrorism
–Israel opens probes amid international pressure
–Officials appear to clear soldiers while probes are ongoing
–Inquiries are slow and not transparent
–IDF killings undermine independent reporting
–Families of journalists have little recourse inside Israel
Sidebar: A deadly reporting field for Palestinian journalists
Sidebar: How Israel probes journalist killings
Faces of killed journalists
Credits: Orly Halpern, reporter and analyst; Naomi Zeveloff and Robert Mahoney, editors (full credits here)
Recommendations
Read the report in Hebrew and Arabic:
On May 11, 2022, Palestinian American television journalist Shireen Abu Akleh embarked on what would be her final assignment. At 6:31 a.m., she walked down a neighborhood road in the Israeli-occupied West Bank city of Jenin. She was accompanied by two other Palestinian journalists and her producer, Ali al-Samoudi. The group wore protective vests with the word “PRESS” in large white letters across their chests and backs. Ahead they could see several Israeli military vehicles.
The journalists were there to report on the aftermath of an Israeli raid in the Jenin refugee camp after a string of deadly attacks by Palestinians in Israel. Video recorded by TikTok users and republished by The Washington Post showed Abu Akleh, a veteran Al-Jazeera Arabic correspondent, and her colleagues on the street. In the minutes before, the area was relatively quiet as local residents milled about, save for the sound of gunfire in the distance.
Suddenly, six shots rang out, one of them hitting al-Samoudi in the shoulder. The journalists ducked for cover and there was a second volley of fire. A bullet hit Abu Akleh in the back of her head in the gap between her helmet and her protective vest, killing her instantly. Several independent investigations by U.S. news outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Associated Press, as well as Netherlands-based research collective Bellingcat, all came to the same conclusion: a member of the Israel Defense Forces likely fired the shot. CNN found evidence of a targeted attack. The London-based research group Forensic Architecture and the Ramallah-based human rights organization Al-Haq also found evidence that the Israeli army targeted Abu Akleh and her journalist colleagues with the intention to kill.
Five months after the killing, an IDF probe concluded there was a “high possibility” that one of its soldiers “accidentally” shot the journalist while firing on Palestinian gunmen, but did not rule out the possibility that she was shot by a Palestinian militant. To date, no one has been held accountable.
The killing of Abu Akleh, one of the Arab world’s most beloved and recognizable journalists, was not an isolated event. Since 2001, CPJ has documented at least 20 journalist killings by the IDF. The vast majority — 18 — were Palestinian; two were European foreign correspondents; there were no Israelis. No one has ever been charged or held accountable for these deaths.
Ahead of the first anniversary of Abu Akleh’s death, CPJ revisited these 20 cases and found a pattern of Israeli response that appears designed to evade responsibility. Israel has failed to fully investigate these killings, launching deeper probes only when the victim is foreign or has a high-profile employer. Even then, inquiries drag on for months or years and end with the exoneration of those who opened fire. The military consistently says its troops feared for their safety or came under attack and declines to revisit its rules of engagement. In at least 13 cases, witness testimonies and independent reports were discounted. Conflicts of interest in the chain of command are overlooked. The military’s probes are classified and the army makes no evidence for its conclusions public. In some cases, Israel labels journalists as terrorists, or appears not to have looked into journalist killings at all. The result is always the same — no one is held responsible.
Israel’s efforts to examine its soldiers’ actions, particularly when it comes to Palestinian journalists killed, amount to less of a serious inquiry than a “theater of investigation,” said Hagai El-Ad, the executive director of Israeli human rights group B’Tselem.
“They want to make it look credible. They go through the motions, things take a lot of time, a lot of paperwork, a lot of back and forth,” he told CPJ. “But the bottom line after all this maneuvering is almost blanket impunity for security forces when using lethal force against Palestinians that is not justified.”
Israel’s army is responsible for 80% of journalist and media worker killings in the Palestinian territories in CPJ’s database. The other 20% — five cases — died due to different causes. Two Palestinians were shot by gunmen in Palestinian Presidential Guard uniforms in 2007; one Palestinian was killed in what was likely an accidental explosion at a Palestinian National Authority security post in 2000. And in 2014, an Italian foreign correspondent and his Palestinian translator died on assignment while following a team of Palestinian engineers neutralizing unexploded Israeli missiles when one detonated.
CPJ’s research spans some of the most violent and repressive years of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, from the start of the Palestinian uprising known as the Second Intifada, in 2000, to repeated Israeli operations against militants. All deaths took place in the West Bank, territory under Israeli military occupation, or in Gaza, a coastal strip under Israeli military blockade. No journalist was killed within Israel’s internationally recognized borders.
Deaths are just one part of the story. Many journalists have been injured, and in 2021 the military bombed Gaza buildings that housed offices of more than a dozen local and international media outlets, including The Associated Press and Al-Jazeera.
Journalists are civilians under international law, and as such militaries must take steps to safeguard them during hostilities. Yet while international law forbids the targeting of civilians, it also acknowledges that such deaths cannot be fully avoided, and doesn’t require armies to investigate themselves every time they occur. Indeed, Israel never announced probes into at least five — a full quarter — of the IDF killings in CPJ’s database. “That doesn’t mean there aren’t situations when investigations are appropriate and necessary to see if someone made an unreasonable judgment related to the use of force,” said Geoffrey Corn, a military law expert at Texas Tech University and a fellow at the pro-Israel nonprofit Jewish Institute for National Security of America.
Israel’s army is responsible for 80% of journalist and media worker killings in the Palestinian territories in CPJ’s database.
Israel’s current military investigative system was born out of the 2010 Turkel Commission, a government commission established in part to ensure Israel was investigating its military actions in accordance with international law. The commission was set up amid concerns that Israeli officials could be arrested abroad for alleged war crimes. In order to avoid the International Criminal Court, which, under the ICC’s principle of complementarity, can exercise jurisdiction where national legal systems are unable or unwilling to act, Israel needed to bolster its institutions to prove it could handle such allegations at home.
Since 2014, the military has opened “fact-finding assessments” into “exceptional incidents” in which the army needs more information to determine “whether there exists reasonable grounds for suspicion of a violation of the law which would justify a criminal investigation,” according to the IDF. Once the assessment is complete, it is delivered to the Military Advocate General, who decides whether to pursue a criminal track in the case. The Israeli military has opened fact-finding assessments into the killings of five journalists, including Abu Akleh, since 2014. It also opened a fact-finding assessment into a large-scale bombardment which killed three other journalists during Israel’s 2014 Operation Protective Edge in Gaza. (Prior to 2014 it opened preliminary probes or conducted very basic checks into other journalist deaths.)
Human rights groups, and Israel’s own state comptroller, have raised concerns about the independence and slow pace of these totally confidential assessments, which can drag on for months or years, by which time witnesses’ memories fade, evidence may disappear or be destroyed, and soldiers involved can coordinate testimonies. In the nine years that this assessment system has been in place, the Military Advocate General has never opened a criminal probe into a journalist killing. (Israel did open one military criminal investigation into the 2003 killing of British journalist James Miller, but closed it without putting the soldier on trial.) Israel has rebuffed claims that its investigative systems are flawed; the IDF says Israel is a “democratic country committed to the rule of law.”
Investigations into military activity are controversial in Israel, where conscription is mandatory and soldiers are broadly seen as the nation’s sons and daughters. In 2017, when Israeli soldier Elor Azaria stood trial for the extrajudicial killing of an incapacitated Palestinian assailant, mass protests erupted. Azaria’s charge was downgraded from murder to manslaughter and he was released nine months into his reduced 14-month sentence.
Shlomo Zipori, a former chief defense attorney of the Military Advocate General’s unit, who represents soldiers in criminal cases, told CPJ that investigations must be weighed against military objectives, as soldiers may begin to overthink their moves in the field if they fear being tried. “I represented a soldier who was still serving in the army while under criminal investigation for killing a Palestinian and injuring another,” he said. “Someone threw a Molotov cocktail at him and he didn’t respond because he was so traumatized by the interrogations he went through in the hands of the military police and he didn’t want to go through them again.” Zipori is also concerned for soldiers’ futures. “If you convict him, you’ll ruin his life,” he said. “There are more than 50 professions he can’t do in civilian life for 17 years if he’s convicted.”
Corn told CPJ that launching a criminal investigation into every killing, even when evidence of criminality is “murky” or insufficient, could impact soldiers’ abilities to do their jobs in the field. Soldiers will assume that every civilian injury will subject them to investigation. “Conversely, when the evidence credibly suggests a violation of law or policy and you don’t do anything about it, you are incentivizing other people to break the rules,” he said.
Time and again after a journalist killing, Israel affirms its commitment to the rights of journalists. “The IDF sees great importance in preserving the freedom of the press and the professional work of journalists,” the army said in an emailed statement to CPJ.
Israeli officials often repeat the assertion that Israel “does not target journalists.” But Israeli authorities need not prove that a killing was intentional in order to open a criminal case into the conduct of a soldier or the soldier’s superiors. There are many other lesser crimes in the country’s military law that could apply, including the Israeli equivalent of involuntary manslaughter. Israel has never put a soldier on trial for an intentional or unintentional killing of a journalist.
“The state has obligations that it might or might not be following, but I think also a democracy can demand more than the legal minimum,” said Claire Simmons, co-author of recent guidelines for states on investigating violations of international law published by the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Geneva Academy. Citizens in democracies can send a strong message to their governments, she said: “‘We are demanding that you be accountable to the actions that you are being involved in, and that you do a better job of protecting lives in armed conflict.’”
So far, the lack of accountability has created a more dangerous reporting environment for local and foreign reporters alike. “Many reporters covering similar raids and tensions — which have risen markedly since Shireen’s killing — are afraid of being shot,” said Guillaume Lavallée, chairman of the Foreign Press Association in Israel, in a statement to CPJ. “If a reporter with an American passport can be killed without legal consequence, journalists fear a similar fate could easily await them in the future. That feeling of vulnerability is particularly strong among our Palestinian colleagues. Some of them fear that they might even be targeted.”
CPJ sent multiple requests to the IDF’s press office to interview military prosecutors and officials but the military refused to meet with CPJ for an on-the-record interview. Below are CPJ’s key findings about IDF killings of journalists:
Abu Akleh’s story is a case study in how Israel often discounts evidence reported in the news and elsewhere. Early on in its probe, the IDF released initial findings raising the possibility that a soldier may have killed the journalist when responding to Palestinian gunfire. But news organizations quickly poked holes in this narrative.
The New York Times said it reviewed evidence that “contradicted Israeli claims that, if a soldier had mistakenly killed her, it was because he had been shooting at a Palestinian gunman.” The Associated Press noted that the “only confirmed presence of Palestinian militants was on the other side of the [Israeli military] convoy, some 300 meters… away, mostly separated from Abu Akleh by buildings and walls. Israel says at least one militant was between the convoy and the journalists, but it has not provided any evidence or indicated the shooter’s location.” Additional investigations by The Washington Post, CNN, and research collective Bellingcat showed a lack of militant activity in the area at the time of the shooting.
Israel has never put a soldier on trial for an intentional or unintentional killing of a journalist.
These investigations were all published months before the IDF issued its final statement. And while the army claimed that it reviewed “materials from foreign media organizations,” it appeared to totally discount those findings. According to the military, there was a “high possibility” Abu Akleh was “accidentally hit by IDF gunfire fired toward suspects identified as armed Palestinian gunmen during an exchange of fire in which life-threatening, widespread and indiscriminate shots were fired toward IDF soldiers.” The IDF did not rule out the possibility that she was killed by a Palestinian gunman.
The IDF also said that “at no point was Ms. Shireen Abu Akleh identified and at no point was there any intentional gunfire carried out by IDF soldiers in a manner intended to harm the journalist.” But weeks after the final IDF statement, Forensic Architecture and Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq published a joint report reconstructing the circumstances of the killing.
“According to both the digital and optical reconstructions of the shooter’s vision, the journalists’ press vests would have been clearly visible throughout the incident,” Forensic Architecture and Al-Haq found. The IDF never responded publicly to the groups’ report, which claimed that the military targeted the journalist.
The Foreign Press Association in Israel also questioned why a soldier with what the IDF said was limited visibility fired toward clearly identifiable journalists without firing a warning shot. “If this is normal operating procedure, how can the army fulfill its stated pledge to protect journalists and respect freedom of the press?” The association demanded Israel to publish the full findings of its probe, which it never did.
Israel has discounted evidence in other high profile cases. In 2002, Italian photojournalist Raffaele Ciriello, who was on assignment for Corriere della Sera, stepped out of a building in Ramallah to take a photograph of a tank some 200 yards away and was shot six times. “The barrage undoubtedly came from the road, where there was not a soul, apart from the Israeli tank,” said another journalist at the scene, Amedeo Ricucci, in an article for Italian newspaper Vita. An Israeli Government Press Office official told the Boston Globe, “From that distance, I’m sure it looked like the guy was getting into a firing position and was about to shoot.” However, the IDF’s official position was that it didn’t kill the journalist. The IDF later said that there was “no evidence and no knowledge of an [army] force that fired in the direction of the photographer.”
“The IDF sees great importance in preserving the freedom of the press and the professional work of journalists.”
– IDF statement to CPJ
In 2003, when Associated Press Television News (APTN) journalist Nazih Darwazeh was killed filming clashes between Palestinian youths and Israeli troops, The Associated Press commissioned an independent investigation that “concluded that the fatal bullet could only have come from the position where the Israeli soldier was standing,” according to AP Vice President John Daniszewski.
Daniszewski told CPJ in an email that Nigel Baker, then the content director of APTN, flew to Israel and presented the investigation to an Israeli officer, who suggested that the IDF conduct its own probe, but “AP never heard results of such an investigation or whether one was undertaken at all.”
A 2003 Reporters Without Borders report found the IDF did make some cursory attempts at looking into the killing, but that other journalists at the scene were only interviewed “informally.” One was summoned to meet with an army official seemingly in order to calm tensions.
“AP was and is outraged by this shooting,” Daniszewski said.
Like Abu Akleh, the majority of the 20 journalists killed — at least 13 — were clearly identified as members of the media or were inside vehicles with press insignia at the time of their deaths. (All but one of the 20 journalists, who was home when his apartment was bombed, was killed on assignment.) But not only did journalists’ efforts to identify themselves fail to protect them, at times officials have cast suspicion on journalists because of their apparel.
“Many reporters covering similar raids and tensions — which have risen markedly since Shireen’s killing — are afraid of being shot.”
– Guillaume Lavallée, chairman of the Foreign Press Association in Israel
In April 2008, Reuters camera operator Fadel Shana, for example, was wearing blue body armor marked “PRESS” and was standing next to a vehicle with the words “TV” and “PRESS” when a tank fired a dart-scattering shell above his head. His chest and legs were pierced in multiple places, killing him. “The markings on Fadel Shana’s vehicle showed clearly and unambiguously that he was a professional journalist doing his duty,” said then-Reuters editor-in-chief David Schlesinger, who demanded an Israeli inquiry into the killing.
But Avichai Mandelblit, who was then Military Advocate General, had a different interpretation of Shana’s press insignia. He wrote to Reuters four months later that Shana’s body armor was “common to Palestinian terrorists” and that he had placed a threatening “black object” — a camera — on a tripod. These were two of the several reasons he told Reuters that the soldier’s decision to open fire on Shana was “sound.”
Shana’s brother, Mohammed Shana, told CPJ that he never received any answers, or any sort of apology, from the Israeli military. “They shot him because they didn’t want him to cover what was happening in that area.” A Reuters spokesperson told CPJ that the company remains “deeply saddened by the loss of our colleague Fadel Shana.”
Ten years after Shana’s death, in April 2018, then-Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman was even more explicit with his attempted justification for an IDF sniper’s shooting of Gaza filmmaker Yaser Murtaja, who wore a helmet and a vest marked “PRESS.” “We have seen dozens of cases of Hamas activists [who] were disguised as medics and journalists,” said Liberman, referring to calls for investigation as a “march of folly,” according to The Jerusalem Post.
Murtaja was covering the Great March of Return, a monthslong protest in which Palestinian demonstrators — some of whom hurled Molotov cocktails, rocks, and burning tires at Israeli troops — demanded to return to their historic homelands inside Israel and the lifting of Israel’s blockade of Gaza. Israeli soldiers killed hundreds of Palestinians, including Murtaja and photojournalist Ahmed Abu Hussein, also in a press vest. Dozens of journalists were injured, leading a 2019 U.N. inquiry to find “reasonable grounds to believe that Israeli snipers shot journalists intentionally.”
“It was very obvious we were being targeted,” said Yasser Qudih, a freelance photojournalist in Gaza, who suffered life-threatening injuries after an Israeli sniper shot him in the abdomen while he was covering the Great March of Return in a press vest. Qudih believes his fellow reporters were diligent about wearing press apparel — and that this may have undermined their safety. “There was a large number of journalists and the Israeli government and Israeli army were trying to keep them away,” he said. “The Israeli army was directly targeting the journalists’ locations.”
Immediately after a journalist is killed by security forces, Israeli officials often push out a counternarrative to media reporting. In Abu Akleh’s case, officials began to blame the other side even as news reports cited witnesses and the Palestinian health ministry saying she was killed by Israeli troops. “Palestinian terrorists, firing indiscriminately, are likely to have hit” Abu Akleh, the Israeli Foreign Ministry tweeted hours after her killing, along with a video of militants that Israeli human rights group B’Tselem found was taken improbably far from the scene of Abu Akleh’s death. Israeli military spokesperson Ran Kochav told Israel’s Army Radio that Abu Akleh “likely” died by Palestinian fire. He seemed to implicate the journalists in the violence: “They’re armed with cameras, if you’ll permit me to say so,” he said on the radio, before adding that the journalists were “just doing their work.”
By the evening, Israeli officials began to walk back these statements, with then-Defense Minister Benny Gantz promising that Israel would transparently investigate her death. Yet the body tasked with the preliminary probe was overseen by Meni Liberty, a member of the chain of command of the unit operating in Jenin that day. Liberty commands the IDF’s Oz Brigade, which includes the elite Duvdevan unit. The Israeli army identified that unit, known for its undercover work in the Palestinian territories, as a possible source of the fire that killed Abu Akleh, according to Haaretz.
“They don’t consider Palestinian journalists as journalists, they consider us the same as Palestinian demonstrators and they target us like they do demonstrators,”
– Hafez Abu Sabra, a Palestinian reporter with Jordan’s Roya TV
In the case of Murtaja, the photographer killed by Israeli fire in 2018, one Israeli official spent weeks trying to discredit the journalist. Then-Defense Minister Liberman called Murtaja “a member of the military arm of Hamas who holds a rank parallel to that of captain, who was active in Hamas for many years” — a claim repeated on Twitter by two spokespeople for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But Liberman never provided evidence and The Washington Post revealed that Murtaja had been vetted by the U.S. government to receive a U.S. Agency for International Development grant to support his production company, Ain Media. Liberman also claimed that Murtaja had used a drone over Israeli soldiers when a video showed him with a handheld camera stabilizer. (The Israeli army told Raf Sanchez, then a reporter for British newspaper The Daily Telegraph, that it had no knowledge of Murtaja working for Hamas.)
Murtaja isn’t the only journalist whom Israel accused of militant activity. In one notable case, the army killed journalists affiliated with a Hamas-run outlet, but never explained why it considered them legitimate military targets. The IDF said Hussam Salama and Mahmoud al-Kumi, camera operators for Al-Aqsa TV, were “Hamas operatives” but a Human Rights Watch investigation found no proof that the two were militants, noting that Hamas did not publish their names in its list of fighters killed. After CPJ called for evidence to justify the attack, the spokesperson for the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., responded two months later with a letter accusing Al-Aqsa TV of “glorifying death and advocating violence and murder.” The letter did not say why the two did not deserve the civilian protections afforded to journalists regardless of their perspective.
In another case, the IDF said that Hamid Shihab, a driver for the Gaza-based press agency Media 24, was transporting weapons in a car marked “TV” when he was killed in an IDF air strike in 2014. The IDF again provided no evidence, saying that “in light of the military use made of the vehicle for the purposes of transporting weaponry, the marking of the vehicle did not alter the lawfulness of the strike.”
Shihab’s brother, Ahmed Shihab, told CPJ this year that the journalist had “no relationship to any Palestinian parties.” He said that the journalist was taking time off to prepare for his wedding when Media 24 called him to pitch in with coverage of Israel’s Operation Protective Edge. After three days of work, he visited his parents for just an hour during Ramadan; after he left the house, he drove to a colleague’s home and was killed.
In yet another case, in 2004, the military told CPJ that Mohamed Abu Halima, who was a student journalist for a radio station at Nablus’ An-Najah National University, had opened fire on Israeli forces, leading them to return fire. But Abu Halima’s producer said that he was on the phone with the journalist moments before he was shot and that Abu Halima had been simply describing the scene around him.
The degree to which Israel investigates, or claims to investigate, journalist killings appears to be related to external pressure. Journalists with foreign passports — like Abu Akleh, who had U.S. citizenship — received a high degree of international attention before the army began probes. Israeli officials appear less likely to investigate the killings of local Palestinian journalists, save for those with strong international connections. But there’s a limit to what international pressure can achieve.
In the case of British journalist James Miller, Israel faced the threat of a British request for the extradition of its soldiers and strained diplomatic tension with the British government. In 2003, Miller was shot in the neck by a soldier inside an armored personnel carrier in the Gaza Strip, but in 2005 the army absolved its troops. After a British inquest jury found in 2006 that Miller had been murdered, then-British Attorney General Peter Goldsmith wrote Israeli officials a letter, giving them a deadline to initiate legal proceedings against the soldiers involved, or they would be tried for war crimes in England, Haaretz reported. In 2009, Israel paid approximately 1.5 million pounds (US$2.2 million) in compensation to Miller’s family. After the Israeli payment, the British Ministry of Justice said it would not pursue legal claims or extradition, according to Haaretz.
The Israeli military, which never admitted responsibility in Miller’s death, initially claimed that its troops returned fire after being fired upon with rocket-propelled grenades. In video of the incident, a shot is fired, after which a member of Miller’s crew shouts, “We are British journalists.” A second shot is fired, and appears to hit Miller. The case was investigated by the Israeli military police, but then-Military Advocate General Mandelblit closed it after deciding there wasn’t enough evidence to try the soldier. (The soldier was also acquitted of improper use of weapons in a separate disciplinary hearing.)
The army said the investigation was “unprecedented in scope” and included ballistics tests, analysis of satellite photographs, and polygraph tests for those involved. However, an internal Israeli army report leaked to The Observer revealed that evidence was tampered with, army surveillance video tapes that may have filmed the killing had disappeared, and that soldiers were overheard “lying.” The report said officers assumed soldiers told the truth, and then explained away inconsistencies in their testimonies because “they were confused because of the fighting.”
“This investigation was an unbelievable fuckup and everywhere we looked it was a whitewash by the army,” Michael Sfard, a lawyer for the Miller family in Israel, told CPJ. “There was no intention whatsoever to get to the bottom of what happened there. And only because the victim had British nationality and strong journalistic entities behind him, the Ministry of Defense went as far as to meet with us, to talk with us, to negotiate with us.”
Israeli officials, including those tasked with investigating killings, often make public statements exonerating soldiers before probes are complete. In Abu Akleh’s case, Yair Lapid, a former journalist who was then Israeli foreign minister, went on a press offensive, writing in The Wall Street Journal that accusations that Israel had targeted the journalist were “Palestinian propaganda.” His op-ed ran nearly three months before the IDF released a statement concluding no “suspicion of a criminal offense.”
Similarly, three months before the army completed its probe into the killing of Reuters’ Shana in 2008, an IDF spokesperson said soldiers “acted according to their orders.” “We can say for sure that the soldiers weren’t able to detect that it was a member of the press. The IDF has no intention of targeting press people,” the spokesperson said. Then-Military Advocate General Mandelblit later determined the killing was “sound” in part because of unrelated threats facing soldiers that day.
According to El-Ad of B’Tselem, a soldier’s professed fears can be enough to sway military examiners. “Generally speaking, many soldiers realize that all they need to say is that they felt threatened and so they opened fire,” he told CPJ. “And when a soldier says that then it’s almost guaranteed to be the end of the story, case closed.”
In at least one case, Israeli officials launched a probe with the explicit goal of exoneration. The IDF’s probe into several 2018 Gaza deaths, including Murtaja’s, would “work to back the troops,” an unnamed IDF officer told Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth. “IDF officials stressed that the panel was formed to help IDF soldiers avoid prosecution in the International Criminal Court at The Hague and should not be interpreted to mean that their actions were in some way unwarranted,” the newspaper said.
The Israeli military often takes months or years to investigate killings and is slow to respond to groups that petition for answers. The Gaza-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rights asked the Israeli military to investigate Murtaja’s death six days after he was killed, according to Iyad Alami, head of PCHR’s legal unit. In an email to CPJ, Alami said the army asked the group for medical reports and eyewitness statements, which the group provided. Nearly two years later, the army responded asking for the names of witnesses who were prepared to testify. PCHR facilitated those testimonies and responded to other requests, but its efforts then ran aground. In October 2021 it asked the army for the results of its probe. It never heard back.
Another Gaza-based organization, Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, filed a request for the army to investigate photographer Abu Hussein’s killing the day after he died from a gunshot wound, two weeks after an Israeli soldier shot him in April 2018. Mervat Al Nahal, the director of the group’s legal aid unit, told CPJ that the military confirmed it received the request but never asked to interview witnesses. Two years later, the Israeli army informed the organization that it closed the case because there was no criminal intent by the soldiers, Al Nahal said.
When CPJ asked the IDF for the results of its probes into the deaths of Abu Hussein and Murtaja — which occurred within weeks of each other — it received identically worded answers that the journalists were “allegedly present at the scene of violent riots” and “no suspicion was found which would justify the opening of a criminal investigation.”
CPJ asked the IDF for the full probes into the deaths of Abu Hussein and Murtaja and other journalists on CPJ’s list, but the IDF did not provide them. Nor did it answer CPJ’s question about why the army keeps these probes confidential.
In some cases, families never learn what happened beyond what is reported in the press. Abu Hussein’s mother, Raja Abu Hussein, said the Israeli army never contacted her about its probe. “The typical answer the Israeli army gives when it kills civilians is that the army did nothing wrong,” she said, adding that she doesn’t trust the army to investigate itself.
“I wish I could meet the guy who killed my son,” she told CPJ. “I would ask him, ‘Why, why did you target my son?’ I think he won’t have an answer. He is a sniper, he kills.”
The IDF killings of journalists have heightened safety concerns for Palestinian and foreign journalists. Gaza journalist Qudih said that Murtaja’s 2018 killing “created fear in the heart of us all,” as journalists’ families begged them to stop their reporting on the Great March of Return protests because of widespread sniper fire.
Those concerns escalated after Abu Akleh’s killing. “I’m not a person who is scared, but I have a 5-year-old daughter who has been telling me she doesn’t want me to go to work so that I won’t be killed like Shireen was in Jenin,” said Hafez Abu Sabra, a Palestinian reporter for Jordan’s Roya TV. “Everyone is scared now especially after what happened to Shireen. Before, they were shooting stun grenades and rubber bullets at us. But now, it’s live bullets and you can lose your life,” he said.
“This is really affecting our coverage,” said Abu Sabra. “We try to avoid places where there are clashes. We try to stay close to ambulances and hospitals and be away from the demonstrators. So, we are much farther away from the event. People are using footage taken by locals in the area and discovering the news in that way.”
Abu Akleh’s killing has also changed the calculus for some foreign news organizations working with local journalists. “Especially after what occurred with Shireen we have taken a much more cautious approach,” said a security adviser for an international news outlet. “If we are dealing with a local national who is doing the primary reporting, if we know of any operations happening in the area we just don’t take chances with these things anymore.” The adviser declined to be named out of concern that the outlet’s journalists would be denied entry to Israel and the Palestinian territories in the future.
The adviser said that in recent years, his news organization has recategorized Israel and the Palestinian territories from a “moderate risk” location to a “high risk” location due to harassment by security forces as well as by settlers and other ultranationalist Israelis that yielded a “very muted response from authorities.” Crews on the ground must now follow stricter communication and safety protocols. They also avoid travel between Israeli and Palestinian areas at night in part out of fears that Palestinians may mistake them for settlers and attack them.
The security adviser pointed to recent access issues. Palestinian journalists have been stopped at West Bank checkpoints and told they cannot proceed to the site of military operations “for your own protection.” Nidal Shtayyeh, a Palestinian photographer for the Chinese news agency Xinhua who was previously shot in the eye while reporting, said these restrictions intensified after Abu Akleh’s killing. “So, there’s no freedom of coverage.” The lack of independent reporting works in the government’s favor, said the security adviser. “They are the only one with a narrative to say ‘this is what happened on the ground.’”
When Shtayyeh did manage to cover a military operation in Jenin in October of last year, he told CPJ that he and a colleague came under fire by Israeli forces while they were filming from inside a building under construction. “We were stuck to the wall for half an hour, terrified that we would be shot,” he said. Their calls for help were broadcast on Palestinian media, where Amira Hass, a veteran Israeli correspondent for Haaretz, heard them. She told CPJ she called the army spokesperson’s office and told a soldier on duty, “Act quickly, because we don’t want another Shireen Abu Akleh, do we?” Soon after, the journalists, who were not injured, were allowed to leave the area.
The IDF Spokesperson’s Unit and the police told Haaretz of this incident that it was “not aware of any accusations of fire being aimed at members of the media.”
The family of one Palestinian journalist on CPJ’s list filed a lawsuit in an Israeli court over the journalist’s death, but the case yielded no results. Imad Abu Zahra, a Palestinian freelance photographer who worked as a fixer for the foreign press, was photographing an Israeli armored personnel carrier that had hit an electrical pole in the West Bank city of Jenin when Israeli tanks opened fire, killing him and injuring a colleague in 2002.
“My son used to tell me that as a journalist he was protected and no one would hurt him,” his mother Hiyam Abu Zahra told CPJ. “But he lost his life with his camera, not using a weapon, because he wanted to show the people what was really happening.”
Abu Zahra’s family filed a tort claim in a Tel Aviv magistrate court against the state of Israel for compensation for the death. According to court documents, Abu Zahra’s colleague testified that Palestinians threw fruits and vegetables at the Israeli soldiers before they fired on the journalist. But the judge accepted the state’s version of events and said that the soldiers were forced to “open fire in view of the danger posed to their lives and safety” after a crowd allegedly hurled stones, Molotov cocktails, and used small firearms against them. The judge rejected the family’s claim and in 2011 ordered the family to pay 20,000 shekels (about US$5,800 at the time) in court fees.
Sameh Darwazeh, the son of Associated Press Television News’ Darwazeh, who was killed in 2003, said his family attempted lawsuits in the Israeli system, but eventually gave up because the cost was prohibitive. He said the lack of justice has “opened the way for the repetitive killing of journalists, and the biggest example is the killing of the journalist Shireen Abu Akleh.”
Abu Akleh’s media outlet is looking beyond the Israeli justice system. The Qatari-funded Al-Jazeera Media Network submitted a formal request to the International Criminal Court — which in 2015 said it had jurisdiction over the Palestinian territories — late last year asking it to investigate Abu Akleh’s killing and prosecute those responsible for what the network described as a “blatant murder.” The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation is also investigating the incident, but Israel has said it will not cooperate.
In a statement ahead of the one-year anniversary of Abu Akleh’s death, the network called on journalists and governments worldwide to act so that the “perpetrators are held accountable and brought to justice, to ensure that no other journalist pays the ultimate price for merely carrying out their duty.”
Meanwhile, Al-Jazeera has continued reporting on the Israeli occupation without the correspondent who defined the beat for a generation of TV viewers. In an essay published in 2021, Abu Akleh wrote about the city where she would die the following year, calling Jenin the embodiment of the Palestinian spirit. Today, the site of her death has become a shrine; the tree where she collapsed is covered in photos of the reporter who once walked the nearby streets, microphone in hand.
Orly Halpern is the reporter and analyst of this report. She is a Jerusalem-based investigative journalist and TV news producer who has worked across the Middle East and Africa and has reported from conflict zones, including in Israel and the Palestinian territories, Iraq, and Afghanistan. She has worked for global broadcasters and has written for major international outlets including Time magazine, The Washington Post, and Foreign Policy. She holds a bachelor’s degree in international relations and in Middle East studies and Islam from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She speaks English, Hebrew, and Arabic.
Naomi Zeveloff, CPJ’s features editor, edited this report. Prior to joining CPJ in 2020, Zeveloff reported for six years from Israel and the Palestinian territories, first as The Forward’s Middle East correspondent and later as a freelancer for outlets such as NPR, The Atlantic, and Foreign Policy. She was also previously The Forward’s deputy culture editor in New York. Originally from Ogden, Utah, she began her career in journalism in the American West, reporting for newsweeklies in Salt Lake City, Colorado Springs, Denver, and Dallas. She holds a bachelor’s degree in political science from Colorado College and a Master of Arts in political journalism from Columbia Journalism School.
Robert Mahoney, CPJ’s director of special projects, also edited this report. Mahoney is a journalist, author, and fighter for press freedom who has been at the forefront of the struggle for press freedom, journalists’ safety, and the right to report since joining the Committee to Protect Journalists in 2005. From 1978 to 2004, Mahoney worked with the Reuters news agency in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. He headed news bureaus in Jerusalem, West Africa, and Germany, and also served as news editor for Europe, Africa, and the Middle East based in London. After a stint as a freelancer and journalism trainer he joined CPJ, where he helped lead the organization and expanded its reporting and advocacy, particularly around the intersection of technology and press freedom. He helped build an Emergencies Response Team to address the growing safety needs of journalists. He became deputy executive director in 2007 and executive director in 2022. He writes on the press and appears in print and media interviews as an expert on media freedom and threats to journalists globally. In 2022 he co-authored with former CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon The Infodemic: How Censorship and Lies Made the World Sicker and Less Free.
Samir Alsharif, a Jerusalem-based local journalist and production manager, provided additional reporting. Working in Arabic, English, and Hebrew, he has supported foreign journalists from a variety of international outlets for more than 12 years. He has overseen logistics, administration, and coordination efforts on multiple projects with National Geographic magazine, and has worked with book authors and on various films.
Sherif Mansour, CPJ’s Middle East and North Africa program coordinator, also provided additional reporting. He is an Egyptian-American democracy and human rights activist. Before joining CPJ, he worked with Freedom House in Washington, D.C., where he managed advocacy training for activists from the Middle East and North Africa. In 2010, Mansour co-founded the Egyptian Association for Change, a Washington-based nonprofit group that mobilizes Egyptians in the U.S. to support democracy and human rights in Egypt. He has monitored Egyptian elections for the Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies and has worked as a freelance journalist. In 2004, he was honored by the Al-Kalema Center for Human Rights for his work in defending freedom of expression in Egypt. Mansour has authored several articles and conducted research studies on civil society and the role of the new media and civil society in achieving democracy. He was named one of the top 99 young foreign policy professionals in 2013 by the Diplomatic Courier. He received a bachelor’s in education from Al-Azhar University in Cairo and a master’s in international relations from the Fletcher School at Tufts University. He speaks Arabic fluently.
Emily Schaeffer Omer-Man provided expert review and additional research. She is an international human rights attorney with more than 15 years’ experience challenging Israeli military policies and practices on behalf of Palestinian litigants in Israeli courts and international tribunals. From 2005 to 2017 she served as senior counsel at the Michael Sfard Law Office and legal director of Yesh Din’s Security Forces Accountability Project, representing more than 500 victims of killing, injury, and other crimes committed by soldiers and border police in the West Bank, including east Jerusalem. She is an adjunct professor of human rights and the rule of law at American University and is regularly invited to lecture and comment on the application of international law to Israel’s occupation.
David Kortava fact-checked this report. Kortava is a journalist on the staff of The New Yorker. He has reported for the magazine on a range of subjects, including Russia’s “filtration camps” in eastern Ukraine — a recent cover story supported by the Pulitzer Center.
Editor’s note: After deadline, the IDF’s North American Media Desk responded to a CPJ fact-checking request about the role of Colonel Meni Liberty in overseeing a probe into Shireen Abu Akleh’s death. Liberty is a member of the chain of command of the unit the IDF identified as a possible source of fire that killed Abu Akleh. The response is below:
The IDF is composed of two types of brigades with key structural differences: ‘organic’ brigades and ‘regional’ brigades. An ‘organic’ brigade is responsible for its forces through a personnel framework, while a ‘regional’ brigade is responsible for the physical space in which the forces carries out operational activity.
During operational activities, the organic force is subject to the command of the regional brigade.
Hence, regarding the circumstances that led to the death of journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, the commander of the Menashe regional brigade was responsible for the command of the Duvdevan soldiers that had operated in the area. COL Meni Liberti, The commander of the Oz Brigade, an organic brigade, had investigated the incident with the understanding that he did not command the force that had operated in the area.
The pattern of journalist killings by the Israeli military constitutes a grave threat to press freedom, undermining journalists’ ability to report the news freely and safely. CPJ calls on Israel, the United States, and the international community to implement the following recommendations to protect journalists, end impunity in the cases of killed journalists, and prevent future killings.
To Israel
To the United States
To the international community
The European Union is facing numerous challenges as it seeks new ways to uphold its commitment to press freedom. This special report – a follow-up to the Committee to Protect Journalists’ 2015 report “Balancing Act: Press freedom at risk as EU struggles to match action with values” – examines the EU’s response to threats such as murders of journalists, pandemic-related media controls, spyware, and the war in Ukraine. The report also includes CPJ’s recommendations to EU institutions and member states on protecting independent media and journalist safety.
The European Union traditionally has been considered among the world’s safest and freest places for journalists. However, increasing pressure on press freedom in Europe has forced EU institutions to find ways to push their 27 member states to uphold their commitments to freedom of expression and the rule of law.
Often, the scope and effectiveness of EU actions in support of press freedom reflect the gap between the values-based narrative that the EU tells about itself and the reality of how it and its member states pursue their interests.
The last election for the European Parliament took place in 2019 against a backdrop of rising populism and concern about illiberal1 governments like Hungary and Poland trampling on the rule of law, including press freedom. Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia and Slovak journalist Ján Kuciak had been murdered in connection with their work. Other journalists had been censored, spied upon, harassed online, overwhelmed with disinformation, subjected to abusive lawsuits, charged with revealing state secrets, beaten while covering street protests, banned from public meetings, or lambasted by politicians.
The EU’s next parliamentary election will take place in 2024. Much has changed in the media landscape since EU citizens last went to the polls. Brussels, the shorthand reference for major EU institutions like the European Commission, the Council, the European Parliament, and the Court of Justice, has increasingly recognized that while journalists played a key role in defending EU interests and values, the EU was not doing enough to protect them – and that this needed to change. Renewed will and a strengthened mandate from the European Commission after 2019 saw Brussels pledge to tackle issues from journalist safety, the economic undermining of independent journalism through media capture, and the vexatious lawsuits known as Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPPs). EU legislation like the Journalist Safety Recommendation, the anti-SLAPP Directive, and the European Media Freedom Act spelled out a positive new direction for the EU.
Professional associations and press freedom groups have also strengthened networks and coalitions that increased their profiles and enhanced the importance of press freedom within the EU institutions, pushing for common EU policies to support journalists and guarantee their safety.
At the same time, new challenges have arisen. Overall, the EU’s shift still needs to be translated into meaningful action within member states. Some governments used the COVID-19 pandemic to control the media, including restricting access to journalists and withholding public-interest information. Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has tested the EU’s ability to protect journalist safety.
Other problems persist too.
In 2015, the Committee to Protect Journalists published “Balancing Act,”2 a special report noting the delicate diplomatic and political way in which the EU was forced to operate given the constraints of a weak legal arsenal and limited ability to change recalcitrant behavior in member states. The report noted that the capacity of the EU was limited to how much power member states were ready to concede to Brussels.
Many other concerns remain. Draft and active digital legislation threatens journalists’ right to privacy and encryption. Trade secrets pose a routine obstacle to legitimate public interest reporting. The EU institutions themselves are far from fully transparent; the European Commission’s handling of access to information requests can result in either restricted information or delayed responses. Journalists interviewed by CPJ say that the ease and flow of the Commission’s media interactions vary, often depending on its relationship with individual outlets or sensitivity on certain subjects.
As CPJ noted in 2015, defending press freedom at home sets an example internationally. However, the EU’s foreign relations strategy for dealing with autocrats who violate journalists’ rights often still lacks uniformity or clarity. The frameworks, response mechanisms, and guidelines are all there and can be effective. The question is the extent to which EU officials abroad know or make use of them and how local trade or political considerations hamper local diplomats’ forceful defense of press freedom in third countries.
This 2023 report, “Fragile Progress,” provides a snapshot of the current state of play regarding the EU institutions and press freedom in recent years. Based on CPJ’s own research and interviews with journalists, press freedom advocates, and EU insiders3, it finds that much progress has been made, but combating entrenched pressure on and threats to journalists in Europe – and setting an effective example for governments around the world – still requires improved and sustained action from Brussels.
The report also includes CPJ’s recommendations to EU institutions and member states on defending press freedom and ensuring journalist safety. Chief among these are:
European Union countries have traditionally been considered among the safest and freest places for journalists in the world. Yet, as the European Commission noted in November 2021, “the number of threats and attacks against them [journalists] have been on the rise in the past years with the most tragic cases being assassinations of journalists.”4
Since the publication of CPJ’s 2015 report, “Balancing Act,” journalists have been killed in EU countries. At least two, Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia and Slovak journalist Ján Kuciak, were murdered because of their work; Swedish journalist Kim Wall was killed on assignment, and the motives for the killing of Bulgaria’s Viktoria Marinova, the Netherlands’ Peter R. de Vries, and Greece’s Giorgos Karaivaz, remain unconfirmed.
Many others in the media have been gagged, spied upon, harassed online, overwhelmed with disinformation, subjected to vexatious lawsuits, charged with revealing state secrets, beaten while covering street protests, banned from public meetings, or publicly criticized by politicians. The COVID-19 pandemic took a toll as some governments used the health emergency to put controls on the media, including restricting access to journalists and retaining public-interest information.5
In 2022, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine added a new and dramatic dimension as journalists reporting on the conflict found themselves in the middle of a disinformation avalanche and partisan online harassment.
Maps of press freedom in the EU are also far from monochrome. Being an EU member does not mean all countries are on the same page on press freedom. In July 2022, the European Commission’s Rule of Law report6 helped illustrate this mixed bag, urging 16 of the 27 member states to take measures to protect journalists, media freedom, and pluralism. It also recommended that eight member states “strengthen rules and mechanisms to enhance the independence of governance and editorial independence of public service media.” The worst-rated countries present features, like media capture or cyber-surveillance,7 which bring them close to autocracies that would never qualify for admission to the EU,8 and which should be in principle held to task by Brussels.9
The European Union has enshrined press freedom in its foundational texts10 and its Charter of Fundamental Rights.11 “The freedom and pluralism of the media shall be respected,” says Article 11 of the Charter. But the EU institutions were not really expected to be actively involved in shaping the media environment nor in adopting proactive measures to defend press freedom.12 These prerogatives were considered to be the preserve of the “capitals” (EU member states) or were in practice delegated to the Council of Europe,13 the Strasbourg-based human rights body, and its international court, the European Court of Human Rights, to which all EU countries must adhere. The EU stepped in only when media-related dossiers took a cross-European and internal market dimension that required coordinated action, like the strengthening of EU audio-visual policy with the adoption of the Television Without Frontiers (TVWF) directive14 in 1989, as well as the Audiovisual and Media Services Directive (AVMSD)15 in 2018.
Little by little, the EU had to stop pretending that press freedom was none of its business. In recent years, the European Project, the name commonly used to describe the long and incremental process of European integration,16 has been directly challenged by a number of crises17 or political developments like the rise of nationalist populist movements including, in some countries, to government. The EU has been forced to gradually assume more responsibilities in its defense of the liberal democratic principles on which it was solemnly constructed after World War II.18
Violence against the press, perceived as belonging to other parts of the world, also became a European issue. The 2015 Al-Qaeda-inspired attack on the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo,19 as well as the gangland-style murders of prominent investigative journalists, including Daphne Caruana Galizia in 2017 in Malta and Ján Kuciak in 2018 in Slovakia, shook the narrative on press freedom in Brussels. “These two assassinations were an additional painful wake-up call, following the Charlie Hebdo massacre which was, policy-wise, primarily seen through a terrorism lens. Killings of journalists, normally associated with third countries, could also occur in the European Union,” David Friggieri, a European Commission official, told CPJ.
These developments created a new sense of urgency. The psychological pressure and clear danger to Caruana Galizia and Kuciak because of their work, along with situations such as the need for round-the-clock police protection for Italian journalists threatened by the mafia, showed Brussels just how vulnerable European journalists were. At the same time, verbal and physical violence from angry citizens or the police became common at public protests, like the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) crisis in France (2018-2020) or demonstrations against state-sponsored COVID-19 policies. “Journalists are being targeted simply for doing their job. Some have been threatened, some beaten and, tragically, some murdered. Right here, in our European Union…They all fought and died for our right to be informed. Information is a public good. We must protect those who create transparency – the journalists,” said Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, in her State of the Union speech in September 2021. This violence took place against a background of a worrying level of EU citizens’ mistrust in the media in a number of EU countries, including France, Italy, and Spain.20
The EU was also confronted with governments or political parties bluntly declaring themselves “illiberal”21 and deliberately trampling on the rule of law and press freedom. “When a country starts rolling back press freedom, it never stops there,”22 U.S. journalist and author Kati Marton23 warned at the 2015 launch in Brussels of the “Balancing Act” report (at a time when Viktor Orbán’s authoritarian rule in Hungary could no longer be dismissed as a trifling matter). The rise of these national populist movements had an additional geopolitical dimension as their leaders courted – or were endorsed by – Russia, a country that hardly veiled its attempts to undermine the EU through disinformation and influence-peddling.24
By the time of the 2019 European elections, the European Commission25 and the European Parliament26 were both regularly and publicly recognizing the role that journalists played in defending EU interests and values, but that the institutions, and the member states, were not doing enough to protect them – and that this had to change. Both bodies were more active than ever before: holding hearings or meetings, issuing statements or resolutions, or making country missions that drew attention to press freedom and the need for Brussels to uphold the rule of law.
At the same time, journalists also became much more conscious of the pan-European dimension of their work. Professional associations and press freedom groups built up stronger networks and coalitions that increased their profile and enhanced the status of press freedom within the European institutions. They pleaded for common EU policies to support journalism and guarantee their safety.27 The convergence of these trends built up a critical mass to address the issue of press freedom at EU level.
By the late 2010s Brussels officials and politicians were openly speaking of a blowback as illiberal democracies were threatening not only the legitimacy and credibility of the EU but also the functioning of its institutions. For the European Commission (then chaired by former Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker), it became obvious that the EU had to go to the front lines.28 Challenged by Hungary and Poland in particular, it slowly engaged in a fraught and delicate exercise aimed at safeguarding the rule of law in its member states.
The crucial question revolved around what the EU could actually do. The jurists who drafted the EU’s rules and the politicians who voted them in perhaps underestimated the extent to which, once inside, some member states would backtrack on the Copenhagen criteria, the rules that define whether a country is eligible to join the European Union.29 They therefore did not provide for foolproof mechanisms to confront this kind of estrangement from the common norms and values that member states had pledged to uphold when they acceded to the so-called “European club.”
The EU’s legal arsenal was in fact quite weak, markedly shown by Brussels’ failure to challenge backsliding in Hungary.30 The so-called infringement procedures31 – legal actions taken by the European Commission against a member state that fails to implement EU law – appear intimidating on paper as the country concerned can be referred to the European Court of Justice and forced to pay financial penalties, but in reality they are complex and long. The rule of law framework,32 in particular the triggering of Article 7 of the Treaty of the European Union, which provides for the suspension of certain rights in case a member state violates the rule of law, could sound impressive too, but the procedure is in part stymied by the so-called unanimity rule requiring that sanctions must be agreed by all member states,33 with the exclusion of the state concerned. If it ever came to a vote on sanctions – requiring unanimity – Hungary and Poland have pledged to support each other against other member states.34
But it was too little too late anyway. Despite the awareness of the danger that he had represented for the EU, Hungary’s Orbán was mostly given a free ride, in large part as he benefited from his Fidesz party’s membership of the center-right European People’s Party (EPP),35 the largest political group in the European Parliament. Between his election victory in 2010 until Fidesz’s suspension from the EPP in March 2019,36 Orbán was able to consolidate power. He was given the time to develop a political model that has been inspiring like-minded politicians elsewhere in Europe (and in the U.S.37) and challenging the traditional EU political consensus around liberal democracy and the rule of law.
The EU’s foreign relations strategy for dealing with autocrats who violate journalists’ rights often still lacks uniformity or clarity.
Press freedom was one of the first targets. “The public media and the regulatory agencies were put under his control, friendly oligarchs captured private media, foreign donors, publishers, and investors were squeezed out…until there were only half a dozen independent media left,”38 CPJ Europe Representative Attila Mong said in an interview. In the late 2010s there were stern warnings, recommendations, and rowdy hearings in the European Parliament about the so-called “Orbánization”39 of Europe as well as a number of infringement proceedings on the rule of law.40 In late 2019, after a mission to Hungary, CPJ, together with six other press freedom organizations, stated that “the Hungarian government has achieved a degree of media control unprecedented in an EU member state” and urged the EU to “take all available measures” to respond. “The construction of a pro-government media empire serves as a vast propaganda machine for the government of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, insulating large parts of the public from access to critical news and information so as to maintain the Fidesz party’s hold on power,41” the joint mission found.
Inaugurated on December 1, 2019, the new Commission, chaired by German Christian Democrat Ursula von der Leyen, could not shirk the challenges. In the wake of Brexit, the UK’s decision to leave the EU – in part interpreted as a broader sign42 of anti-establishment politics and a growing distance between people and politicians43 – the threat to Brussels was clear.
Reaffirming the EU’s commitment to democracy was imperative. Although it remained constrained by its limited powers, the EU pledged to give teeth to the Rule of Law Mechanism, including around making EU funds conditional on respect for the rule of law and finding creative ways to circumvent the legalistic juggernaut. Political will and retaking the initiative became the new mantras in the Brussels’ European quarter.
A few months later, the COVID-19 pandemic further highlighted the urgency of protecting press freedom and journalism, in particular by combatting disinformation as well as EU governments’ temptations to control the narrative and impose restrictions and censorship.44 In March 2020, then European Parliament President David Sassoli (now deceased) stated that “nobody can be allowed to use this pandemic to undermine our freedoms.”45 Hungary again set the bad example. In March 2020, its parliament passed amendments to the penal code threatening journalists with prison sentences if they were found guilty of spreading false information about the pandemic.46 But Budapest was not alone: as a report of the Council of Europe Platform for the Safety of Journalists confirmed, a number of other EU member states (Bulgaria, Spain, Greece, and Romania) also adopted measures restraining the press’s right to report.47
Flexing Financial Muscle
In 2022, the European Commission for the first time invoked the conditionality mechanism against Hungary because of rule of law concerns.48 This procedure allows Brussels to withhold EU funds to member states for rule of law breaches that affect the EU’s budget.49 Although the withholding of funds from Hungary was made in relation to corruption and the use of EU funds, the move was important as it showed that Brussels was finally ready to flex its financial muscles.
Under the leadership of Commissioner Věra Jourová,50 the vice president for values and transparency, and with the support of Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton,51 a more comprehensive plan to create an enabling environment52 for media freedom was hatched. While previous policies had been mostly ad hoc, reactive, and piecemeal, the European Commission proposed a strategy for its five-year term.53 The launch of the European Democracy Action Plan in December 2020 framed the overall objective. Standing up to challenges from illiberalism and strengthening press freedom were at the core of it. This plan was complemented by a European Media and Audiovisual Action Plan54 to help the sector recover from a series of crises (including the impact of the internet and the pandemic) and transform itself by embracing and monetizing the digital transition.55
Jourová was critical to this significant shift on press freedom. Visibly moved by her early engagement56 with the family of Caruana Galizia and shocked by Kuciak’s murder, Jourová took it on herself to push Brussels to better protect journalists in Europe.57 Her own background played a key role. “She was born in a communist country (the former Czechoslovakia), she knows what lack of freedom of thought means, she also grasps the deleterious impact of propaganda,” one of her close advisers told CPJ.
But there were other factors at work. Institutionally, the European Parliament assumed a bigger role. Its growing protagonism largely contributed to putting press freedom on the EU agenda as a number of members (MEPs) actively devoted themselves to freedom of expression issues.
Likewise, there was growing awareness that the EU was reaching a crossroads. European parliamentarians were realizing that Hungarian-style majoritarianism and restrictions on press freedom were creating conditions for flawed electoral processes that allowed illiberal governments to stay in power and continue undermining EU values and institutions.58 As Dutch liberal MEP Sophie in ‘t Veld told CPJ, the EU had to “finally decide what kind of creature it was: a purely inter-governmental entity or a community of values.” In addition, Brexit meant the UK – the member state most opposed to the idea of the EU meddling in national media affairs – could no longer cause headaches. “British newspaper publishers had been the most robust in challenging Brussels initiatives. They interpreted them as a risk for press freedom,” Aidan White, founder and honorary president of the Ethical Journalism Network, told CPJ.
The EU is typically seen as responding to questions about its passivity or impotence by highlighting its funding of a very diverse number of initiatives. These budgets clearly reflect the EU’s priorities and its defense of quality and public-interest journalism. Its major objectives include the fight against corruption through the reinforcement of investigative journalism on EU-related issues, like the embezzlement of EU funds, the rollback of disinformation, and the monitoring of attacks on the press. The European Commission also supports press councils, fact-checking and media literacy projects, and the elaboration of business models and of innovation strategies.59 The European Commission also funds academic institutions, like the Florence-based European University Institute’s Centre for Media Pluralism and Media Freedom (CMPF), which provides expert guidance on media-related issues and publishes the Media Pluralism Monitor, an essential tool to use objective criteria in discussions on media capture and media concentration.
However, it became clear that throwing money at problems was no longer enough. The EU had to confront issues head-on – politically. The first annual Rule of Law Report was published in 2020.60 It was meant as a warning: publicizing the failings in a particular member state was expected to name and shame it into adopting necessary reforms. But it was also conceived as a more objective basis to justify real action, including on media freedom and pluralism,61 with the overall aim of preventing future backsliding. It provided a country by country assessment that included indicators on transparency of media ownership, regulation, and safety of journalists.
In September 2021, the European Union adopted a recommendation on the protection, safety, and empowerment of journalists,62 setting out concrete actions for member states to take. It sought to convince member states to address some of the underlying daily problems faced by so many European journalists: unresponsive law enforcement to threats, physical violence (including at protests), and online harassment, with an emphasis on female and minority journalists. The recommendation is not legally binding63 and, at the time of writing this report, Brussels had not publicly disclosed whether any member states had provided requested updates on their actions in this regard. Time will tell the extent to which some of the EU’s more illiberal governments use smokescreens or obstructive tactics to avoid meaningful action or discussion on how to make journalists safer.
In 2022, the European Commission also issued a proposal for a directive to address what is broadly considered one of the biggest threats to independent journalists in Europe: Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPPs). These civil or criminal suits are typically brought by individuals, institutions, or corporations to burden journalists and others with the distraction and cost of a legal defense – even if the plaintiffs themselves do not expect to win the case.64 The directive, taking on civil cross-border cases, strives to address the personal isolation and legal uncertainty faced by SLAPP victims. Alongside the directive proposal, the European Commission formulated another recommendation that identified a number of measures for member states to counter vexatious criminal and civil lawsuits – both texts followed sustained calls from SLAPP victims, journalists and civil society.
“The Commission’s proposal provides for early dismissal procedures and shifts the burden on the claimant to prove the claim is not manifestly unfounded. It also obliges member states to ensure that the costs of the proceedings can be imposed on the claimants,”65 explains Maria Diaz Crego, policy analyst at the European Parliamentary Research Service (EPRS).
The directive could be adopted in 2023,66 but while it has been largely welcomed by groups like the Coalition Against SLAPPs in Europe (CASE) – of which CPJ is a member – it will apply only to cross-border civil cases – about 10% of all suits.67 “There was no legal basis [for applying the directive] for purely national cases, but it is a political signal that undermines SLAPPS generally,” Nick Aiossa, Transparency International EU’s deputy director, told CPJ.68 CASE reports, however, that the Commission was innovative in its thinking about what could be considered cross-border and has been pushing for the parliament and council to maintain as broad an interpretation as possible, rooted in public interest.69
Laurent Mauduit, co-founder of French investigative online outlet Mediapart, told CPJ that his website had faced about 300 lawsuits since its founding in 2008. Mauduit himself has received 12 legal complaints from a single bank. “We live in a judicial universe of litigation,” he said. Matthew Caruana Galizia, son of the murdered Maltese journalist, has told EU institutions that his mother was facing 43 civil and five criminal libel suits at the time of her assassination70 – some of which her family are still fighting years after her death.
A March 2023 text agreed by member states indicates they want to water down key parts of the draft law, including the important provisions for cross-border cases and early dismissal. CASE cited the “compromise proposal” as “self-defeating” and “contrary to the purpose of the anti-SLAPP Directive and undermines its spirit.”
The EU has also responded to pressure to rein in big tech, putting into effect the long-awaited Digital Services Act (DSA) and Digital Markets Act in November 2022 (to be applied in full by member states by 2024).71 According to digital-rights group Access Now, the DSA was the “first time in the history of EU platform governance regulation that people’s fundamental rights are put at the forefront,”72 with both acts seeking to “create a safer digital space.”73
The DSA covered the question of content moderation, which media representatives and organizations like CPJ had noted could potentially impact journalism through the removal of journalistic content or of sensitive yet legitimate source material.74 The reactions to the bill were nuanced. “The final bill avoids transforming social networks and search engines into censorship tools, which is great news,” said the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a defender of free speech online. “It also retains important principles under the previous internet rules that helped to make the internet free, such as allowing liability exemptions for online platforms for the speech of others and limiting user monitoring. And it improves things as well, by imposing higher standards for transparency around content moderation and creating more user control over algorithmically-curated recommendations.”
However, the EFF added, “the final deal isn’t all good news… The DSA obliges platforms to assess and mitigate systemic risks, but there is a lot of ambiguity about how this will turn out in practice. Much will depend on how social media platforms interpret their obligations under the DSA, and how European Union authorities enforce the regulation.”75 The future litmus test for the DSA will be the speed, transparency, and effectiveness of platforms’ response to journalists’ complaints, the extent to which platforms’ risk assessments and mitigation measures handle media freedom concerns effectively and are trusted by journalists and the media freedom community, and the way that platforms’ presentation of content promotes media freedom and pluralism.
Some media groups had asked for a media exemption, or the right to be warned by online platforms before any decision affecting their content was taken. Without it, “the boundaries of press freedom would no longer be defined by law, but by private companies,”76 warned Ilias Konteas, director of EMMA/ENPA,77 two organizations representing Europe’s magazine and newspaper publishers. However, a media exemption was not included in the final version of the DSA,”78 with the European Commission’s Jourová labeling it “one of those good intentions leading to hell.”
The refusal was mainly due to tech companies’ opposition, but also because of anti-disinformation activists’ concern about the exploitation of the exemption in an environment where anyone with a smartphone and the ability to post on social media could call themselves a journalist or a publisher. “Granting blanket exemptions for the media sector would defeat the DSA’s number one objective of ensuring the safety of users online,” wrote tech expert Victoria de Posson, currently secretary-general of the European Tech Alliance (EUTA). “Free speech must be protected with exceptions for some specific content, instead of creating sector-specific exemption.”79
]]>Other governments, like those headed by Slovenia’s “pro-Trump populist”80 Prime Minister Janez Janša from 2020-2022 and Greece’s conservative Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, also adopted illiberal practices, from media capture to public denigration of critical journalists.81
Yet the European Union can only act in those areas where its member states have authorized it to do so. The European Commission has been given so-called “exclusive competences”82 on competition policies and trade, for instance, but it shares these powers with member states on justice and fundamental rights, which cover press freedom. The challenge has been how to push the interpretation of the treaties to uphold rights in ways that might not be open to legal dispute.
“We need new laws which draw on the European Commission’s own core and unquestionable prerogatives,” a top EU official dealing with Hungary told CPJ in mid-2022, not long after the authorities blocked the broadcasting license of Budapest-based Klubrádió [radio] station.83 “The only time Orbán had to backtrack is when we applied EU market regulations in order to protect Klubrádió, that he had in his crosshairs,” said the official. “The Commission argued that the power of some pro-Orbán media is such that it effectively prevents others to enter into the market, which is in clear violation of the rules on competition and cross-border investments.” Klubrádió however still ended up losing its license.84
Using internal market rules as a legal basis requires, however, some innovative thinking. “If, for instance, a member state hampers media investigations into corruption, its action might be considered a violation of transparency rules necessary to the internal market,” a senior European Commission official told CPJ. “If it misuses EU funds to reward friendly media with state advertising it may be a breach of internal market regulations.” Justice Commissioner Didier Reynders told Le Soir in July 2022 that the Commission was in the process of developing a wider competence on this issue. “We can act on media regulators and broadcasting licenses, or by regulating public authorities’ communications or advertising because the allocation of resources by these authorities may totally unbalance the relations among the media.”85 Marius Dragomir, founding director of the Santiago de Compostela-based Media and Journalism Research Center, told CPJ that these were crucial questions, “as media capture by oligarchs and the scooping [hijacking] of state advertising and subsidies drastically limit new investments from other private or not-for-profit actors.”
In the struggle to find ways to protect media pluralism and independence in the EU, the European Commission announced its proposal for the European Media Freedom Act (EMFA) on September 16, 2022. 86 Using EU market law as its basis, the draft regulation seeks to broadly defend journalists from “undue interference” by safeguarding editorial independence; protecting journalists against abusive spyware; funding and creating guarantees to ensure public service87 media is independent; and improving transparency around media mergers, ownership, and state advertising. The spirit of the text was clearly to limit or curb the financial and political capture of media by certain EU governments or business interests connected to those governments. A proposed independent European Board for Media Services comprised of national media authorities would provide oversight and assist the Commission.88 The Commission also adopted a complementary recommendation to, amongst other things, encourage internal safeguards for editorial independence and transparency around media ownership. “The idea is to create common standards related to the issues identified in the rule of law reports,” according to Marie Frenay, an adviser to Commissioner Jourová.
“Information is a public good. We must protect those who create transparency – the journalists.”
– Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission
Many press freedom advocates welcomed the proposal, saying that linking internal trade law with press freedom was a smart and significant step forward, placing press freedom front and center. “It is the first time the Commission considers news as a public good,” European Federation of Journalists Director Renate Schroeder told the European Journalism Symposium in Brussels in November 2022. The proposal also gave it a pan-European dimension. “Press freedom is still often considered as a national or even a local issue. We must get out of this national fragmentation,” said Jean-Pierre Jacqmin, news director at the French-language Belgian public broadcaster RTBF. “If passed, this new law would represent a major shift in EU policy on the media, and a welcome shot in the arm for democracy across the Union,”89 wrote Damian Tambini, distinguished policy fellow in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics.
However, journalists and press freedom groups also identified a number of limits and ambiguities. These include questions on whether the law goes far enough on media ownership transparency,90 whether requirements could apply to the full breadth of possible media service providers, how it could be enforced, and how information could be made publicly accessible.
In addition, would the proposed European Board for Media Services91 be independent given that it would be made up of representatives of national media regulatory boards? Although Article 53 of the Audiovisual Media Services Directive clearly requires these boards’ independence from governments, “some of these national bodies, like in Croatia, are under political pressure,”92 warned Maja Sever, president of the Croatian Union of Journalists and of the European Federation of Journalists. Another concern: what would guarantee that the board’s actions and opinions were independent of the European Commission? And how would the board work with press freedom groups as part of a proposed structured dialogue?
Another challenge is ensuring that the EU’s proposals meet the standards and interpretation provided by the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and case-law from the European Court of Human Rights on protecting journalists and their sources, including from all forms of spyware and surveillance. Dirk Voorhoof, a European media law expert at Ghent University and a member of Columbia University’s global freedom of expression network, notes that the provisions intended to protect journalistic sources risk being “a step backwards” because they “[do] not guarantee the level of protection that all EU member states should already respect as developed and applied in the well-established case law of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) on this topic.”93 Voorhoof has called for more precise judicial safeguards, like court orders or proportionality requirements, to be included in the final text. The European Data Protection Supervisor has also said it does not go far enough on clarifying journalists’ protections.94
One article of the text95 proposes that media outlets declare themselves as media in order to better engage with online platforms in “meaningful dialogue…with a view to finding an amicable solution” on content-removal decisions. This approach has divided opinions amongst press freedom and disinformation groups about how such a system would work in practice, including potentially creating loopholes for media outlets considered as seeking to spread disinformation.96
Some skeptics also criticize the lack of penalties for noncompliant member states. “It leaves too much ground to member states,”97 said Maria Diaz Crego, an analyst at the European Parliamentary Research Service.
The draft legislation will have to navigate between the institutions to be adopted by the Council and the European Parliament and confront a number of member states that feel the Commission has gone beyond the limit of its mandate. Some governments, in particular Germany, which is under pressure from its media publishers, unsuccessfully raised concerns about the legal basis of the act.98
Journalists and press freedom groups share a strong consensus on core issues like violence against the press, SLAPPs, or surveillance. But journalist unions, member states and media owners do not necessarily see eye to eye on the question of editorial independence, public service media, media concentration, or ownership transparency. Finding common ground between divergent group interests and different levels of tolerance for interference will be yet another balancing act for the EU.
Guide to EU legislation
Regulation
Directive
Recommendation
Journalists’ organizations and press freedom advocates have welcomed many of the European Commission’s current initiatives.
However, other measures – such as digital legislation – have raised fears of harmful side-effects for the media. While claiming virtuous objectives – like combating online child abuse,99 fighting terrorism,100 supporting criminal investigations,101 or protecting privacy102 – journalists and digital rights activists fear that the implementation of some provisions may adversely impact media freedom by potentially paving the way to online censorship or undermining reporters’ source confidentiality or their ability to work effectively or securely.
On content moderation, media organizations are particularly concerned about the risks of relying on private tech companies to defend press freedom when they decide whether to delete or keep information. The specter of crushing fines, journalists fear, may lead these companies to err on the side of excessive caution and unjustified censorship. “When it comes to content regulation, the EU should be careful not to open space for national governments to misuse the rules,” the Media and Journalism Research Center’s Dragomir told CPJ. “It really can have a chilling effect on journalism or freedom of expression.”
Dragomir notes that well-intentioned measures may in fact be misused by illiberal actors. “The much-vaunted GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation], a law meant to protect EU citizens’ personal information, includes a journalistic exemption, but it has nonetheless sometimes been misused by governments to block publication or deny requests to access information,” he told CPJ.
Little by little, the EU had to stop pretending that press freedom was none of its business.
In 2020, for instance, a Hungarian court ordered the recall of the issue of Forbes Hungary on the country’s 50 richest people after one company complained that the magazine had violated the GDPR by listing the company owner’s name without his permission.103
This was not an isolated case.
In October 2020, a Hungarian court issued a gag order that cited the GDPR to prevent the weekly Magyar Narancs newspaper from publishing an article on Budapest-based soft drinks company Hell Energy and its owners.104 “Due to incomplete, confused or overly narrow national implementations of this journalistic exemption, the GDPR is increasingly discovered as an instrument to discourage, or punish, critical news coverage,” writes Melinda Rucz, a researcher at the Institute for Information Law (IViR) at the University of Amsterdam. “GDPR-based litigation and administrative proceedings emerge as new forms of strategic litigation against public participation (SLAPP), with dangerous implications for the protection of public interest journalism in Europe.”105
In late 2019 Romanian authorities filed a complaint under the GDPR, ordering the investigative outlet Rise Project to reveal its sources on a report alleging corruption involving Liviu Dragnea, then president of the ruling party, or pay a fine of up to 20 million euros (US$23 million).106
The GDPR has also been used to obstruct journalists who want to get access to CCTV footage for their investigations. “On several occasions, in Slovakia for instance, I went there immediately to collect evidence on attacks on the press. But I was refused access to CCTV,” Vlad Lavrov, a senior editor at the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), told CPJ. Although journalists can express concern about the misuse of the GDPR to the European Commission,107 to date there has been no formal infringement procedure against these offending countries for press freedom abuses.
Recent years have seen a growing tension between free speech advocates and the EU over efforts to obtain expanded access to end-to-end encryption of electronic communications.
For journalists, encrypted messages are essential to obtain confidential information and protect their sources. For governments and law-enforcement agencies, encrypted messages provide a hiding place for criminal activities like terrorism or child sexual abuse.
The European Commission says it is committed to protecting children by proposing new legislation to help online service providers in detecting online child abuse, but in doing so risks opening the door for the automated scanning of everyone’s private communications. Civil society organizations – including CPJ – have called on the EU “to not interfere with encryption services, which protect both cybersecurity and journalists’ ability to communicate with their sources securely.”108
In a position paper published in October 2022, international advocacy network European Digital Rights (EDRi) warned against the potential collateral damage of the European Commission’s proposal for a Child Sexual Abuse Regulation. “The proposal is a fishing exercise,” said EDRi, “treating all internet users in the EU as potential child sexual abuse perpetrators. By casting a wide net instead of starting with reasonable suspicion of individual perpetrators, the proposal turns the presumption of innocence on its head and inverts the rule of law, due process and the right to the presumption of innocence.”109
The proposed regulation, noted EDRi, would interfere “with a wide range of other rights and freedoms, including free expression.” As pressure mounts to conclude negotiations on the proposal before the 2024 elections, critics – including within the EU institutions – are vocal in their complaints that the Commission has failed to meet the test of proportionality.110 It is now up to the European Parliament (and member states) to weigh in with a counter-strategy that allows for both the protection of child rights and encryption.111
In July 2021 the Pegasus Project, an investigation led by Forbidden Stories with the assistance of Amnesty International’s Security Lab,112 revealed how some EU countries, in spite of being officially committed to protect journalists’ freedom, had used surveillance technology to spy on the press.113 In response, the European Parliament set up the PEGA Committee of Inquiry to investigate alleged breaches of EU law in the use of the surveillance software in EU member states and, in association with the Foreign Affairs Committee (AFET), in non-EU countries where its use could have implications for EU relations. The European Commission lacks powers to hold member states to account – a weakness to be partially addressed in the upcoming European Media Freedom Act.
On September 9, 2021, the EU put in force a new regulation114 on the export of dual-use technology, covering in particular surveillance technologies used and abused in order to spy on journalists in third countries. But as CPJ, together with a number of NGOs, had warned115 on September 8, 2021, effective implementation by member states was not guaranteed. EU member states, including Bulgaria and Cyprus, were subsequently reported to have exported surveillance equipment to third countries.116 On December 8, 2022, the Greek government also confirmed to The New York Times that it gave Athens-based company Intellexa the official permits to export the malicious spyware Predator to Madagascar.117
Brussels recognizes that disinformation118 – which it defines as “false or misleading content that is spread with an intention to deceive or secure economic or political gain and which may cause public harm” – poses a major threat for democracies by undermining and polluting the fact-based, political decision-making on which they are founded. In recent years, the problem of “fake news” and post-truth politics has been exacerbated within the EU by the rise of illiberal, anti-Brussels movements. It has also been associated, as underlined in a report for the European Parliament’s DROI human rights subcommittee, with inciting “violence, discrimination or hostility against identifiable groups in society.”119 A ground-breaking 2022120 report on foreign interference in EU democracies found that a number of hostile states, including Russia and China, had tried for years to manipulate public opinion by using disinformation on media and social networks. Among the recommendations the MEPs considered were revoking the licenses of organizations distributing foreign state propaganda and forcing social media platforms to stop boosting inauthentic accounts “that drive the spread of harmful foreign interference.”
The European Commission published a strengthened Code of Practice on Disinformation in June 2022.121 Signed by 34 companies and organizations, including Google, Meta, and Twitter, this voluntary code includes proposals such as demonetizing the dissemination of disinformation; ensuring the transparency of political advertising; enhancing cooperation with fact-checkers; and providing researchers with better access to data.122
The dilemma here is when the battle against disinformation crosses the line into censorship. “A number of member states, among them Hungary, have adopted anti-fake news policies which in reality constrain freedom of expression,”123 French media law scholar and fact-checking expert Vincent Couronne explains.
If they agree that building trust in journalism is crucial, press freedom organizations are not necessarily on the same page when they discuss concretely how to combat disinformation. The debate often focuses on the labeling of the media according to their level of trust and reliability, the linking of EU funding to the respect of core journalistic principles, or the banning of media accused of being tools of influence of foreign states. “When Google qualifies as state media those which receive public funding, we are on the wrong track,” said Dragomir when he raised the confusion by some tech platforms between independent public broadcasters (like the U.K.’s BBC) and non-independent, state-controlled media (like Russia’s RT). “Imposing such labels in the legislation might be problematic too. How do you guarantee that such a system will not be hijacked or that it is adapted to smaller media operators?”
The EU’s 2022 suspension of broadcasts by Russian state media RT (previously Russia Today) and Sputnik because of “systematic information manipulation and disinformation by the Kremlin” following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, also raised concerns amongst some press freedom activists as it was imposed as part of EU sanctions, instead of being grounded in the implementation of existing EU and national media legislation. “The EU Council and Commission might have opened a Pandora’s box to the detriment of its own crucial values of democracy, the rule of law and media freedom,”124 warned Ghent University’s Voorhoof.
“Disinformation is a serious problem of our times. Censorship is an easy answer, but it’s not the right answer.”
– Thomas Bruning, general secretary of the Netherlands Society of Journalists (NVJ)
In May 2022, the main Dutch journalists’ union (NVJ) filed a lawsuit with the Court of Justice of the European Union challenging the suspension as a violation of European citizens’ own rights to freedom of information. “Allowing the ban to go unchallenged could set a precedent for banning other politicized news outlets,” NVJ General Secretary Thomas Bruning argued. “Disinformation is a serious problem of our times. Censorship is an easy answer, but it’s not the right answer.”125
RT France also questioned the suspension and submitted a request to the Court of Justice of the European Union. In July, the court upheld the ban, ruling that there was a “concrete, precise and consistent body of evidence” that can demonstrate RT’s disinformation campaigns constitute a “significant and direct threat” to the EU’s public order and security.126 Freedom of expression advocates criticized the Commission’s decision for questionable proportionality.
To date, the European Commission has not given a clear response to inquiries from freedom of expression groups – including CPJ – including when the ban will end and what resources they have allocated to monitor the ban.127
War in Ukraine
The EU’s commitment to assisting journalists has been tested by Russia’s war against Ukraine,128 with many member states providing refuge or support to Russian and Ukrainian journalists affected by the war.
In the new emergency support program for Ukraine,129 15 million euros have been earmarked for measures to strengthen the media. Ukrainian journalists based in Ukraine or in EU candidate countries can also benefit from support from the EU-funded Media Freedom Rapid Response network, which provides grants of up to 5,000 euros to cover needs such as medical assistance, subsistence, relocation costs and psychological support. The Journalists-in-Residence program130 is already offering temporary shelter to a number of journalists in Leipzig and Milan. Despite the emergency, “exiled journalists have experienced difficulties to obtain visas and to normalize their situation by opening bank accounts or getting a job,” Ricardo Gutiérrez, general secretary of the European Federation of Journalists, told CPJ. Independent Russian journalists have also received a mixed welcome, even though Gutiérrez sees them as “crucial in any strategy aiming to circumvent the news blackout that has fallen on Russia.”
The war may also influence the way the EU deals with its rule of law procedures against Hungary and Poland as these two illiberal countries have adopted radically different approaches to the armed conflict. While Hungary’s Orbán has expressed support for Putin, Poland’s government has emerged as one of the most vocal EU member states against Russia. “The imperative to maintain European unity in the face of Russian aggression has put the EU political establishment under pressure to de-escalate its rule of law conflict with Poland’s ruling party, Law and Justice,”131 Sussex University professor Aleks Szczerbiak wrote in July 2022.
“In open conflict with the European Commission on Rule of Law issues, Poland’s immediate and unfailing support to Ukraine since the first days of the Russian aggression, its exemplary reception of millions of refugees, its position as a hub for Western military assistance to Kyiv, have put her back on the saddle,”132 added Le Monde and The New York Times columnist Sylvie Kauffmann.
Adopted in June 2016 to standardize the national laws in EU countries against the unlawful acquisition, disclosure, and use of trade secrets, the Trade Secrets Directive has been controversial from the outset. According to the European Commission, the directive does not affect press freedom nor the right to information. “Journalists remain free to investigate and publish news on companies’ practices and business affairs, as they were before,” the Commission states. “The Directive only deals with unlawful conduct by which someone acquires or discloses, without authorisation and through illicit means, information with commercial value that companies treat as confidential in order to keep a competitive advantage over their competitors. Even when a trade secret is misappropriated, the Directive foresees a specific safeguard in order to preserve the freedom of expression and right to information (including a free press).”133
Journalists are not reassured, however, as private companies as well as public institutions in a number of countries have brandished the directive to deter journalists from reporting. “It contributes to opacity in the name of the protection of company secrets,” researcher Hans van Scharen of Corporate Europe Observatory, an advocacy group that tries to curb corporate influence over EU policy making, told CPJ. Mediapart’s co-founder Laurent Mauduit lists a number of prominent cases in France where the directive was used against journalists although their investigations had a clear public interest (for example on the management of nursing homes,134 the shortage of face masks135 in the first weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, or health concerns about breast implants136) and were the focus of intense political controversies. In 2022, the French company Altice referenced the trade secrets law in its effort to stop online magazine Reflets.info from publishing investigative articles related to the company’s activities “because of a risk of imminent damage posed by the dissemination of new information, which could compromise the protection of trade secrets.”137 The French judiciary, however, lifted the ban on January 19, 2023, alleging that “the trade secrets law could not be used against journalists who had done their work of investigation.” The court ordered the company to pay legal costs to the magazine’s publisher and the French Union of Journalists SNJ (Syndicat national des journalistes).138
The press corps remains a major actor in Brussels in spite of a decline in the number of accredited correspondents as many legacy media downsized staff or began covering the EU from outside of Brussels. The European Commission’s midday briefings are a key source of news. But some journalists question whether those briefings truly provide the information and context needed to report thoroughly on complex issues.
While a 2021 survey of EU correspondents by the Council of the European Union noted “a close and trusted relationship between officials and media professionals in Brussels,”141 many Brussels-based reporters are more nuanced about this relationship. “People are accessible, they respond to your calls,” György Folk, of the Hungarian website EUrologus, replied to a CPJ question at the Brussels Journalism Symposium142 in November 2022. Folk’s fellow-panelist Eric Bonse, correspondent for the Berlin-based left-wing daily Tageszeitung, disagreed. “It’s more propaganda than information,” said Bonse. “And conditions are worsening.”
Marco Appel, former correspondent of the Mexican weekly magazine Proceso and founder of the Brussels-based online site Underground Periodismo Internacional, told CPJ that the communication of EU institutions is “amazing” compared to Mexico. “But it has become more complicated over the years,” he said. Officials often insisted on speaking off the record without being named, “meaning that no one assumes the responsibility of the information” and that his requests were often stonewalled. “I was systematically refused the minutes of meetings on human rights in Mexico,” he said. “Without mentioning the fact that most media from non-EU countries are very much down the line of attention.”
James Kanter, a former correspondent for The International Herald Tribune and The New York Times, told CPJ that cautious official spokespeople frequently hid behind carefully tailored EU jargon. “If you depend on the Commission for a story you are nowhere,” he said.
“Press relations officials were more amateur in the 1980s-2000s, they became more professional with the clear will to control the message,” says Gareth Harding, director of the Brussels Program at the U.S.-based Missouri School of Journalism. “There is an inherent conflict between what the media want and the EU’s communications strategies. Brussels is a city of compromise, very diplomatic, where the EU officials know they have to make sure they don’t upset member states. It is all about process, long-winded negotiations. It does not make for dramatic journalism, while some journalists would like to sex it up.”
Many correspondents refer to an increasingly controlled EU communications policy. “We are facing people, often very young, inexperienced, who are pure communicators,” said Jean-Pierre Stroobants, a longtime correspondent for France’s Le Monde. “It is difficult to have a follow-up to questions that have not received a satisfactory answer during the midday briefings. Specialists in the general directorates are generally out of reach.” Stroobants also noted that the EU sometimes organized briefings with just “a few privileged correspondents,” which meant excluding other journalists.
“The touchier the issue, like migration, the more laconic the spokespersons,” Dutch-Italian correspondent Gian-Paolo Accardo, founder of the independent news website VoxEurop, told CPJ. The messaging on the war in Ukraine has also been tightly managed. “Throughout ten rounds of sanctions against Russia, the Commission has proven that it can keep sensitive information secret when it needs to. Parliament may not be able to say the same,“ wrote POLITICO’s Jakob Hanke Vela in February 2023.143
“The EU is very self-protective. They don’t seem to see that more transparency might help build trust.”
– Helen Darbishire, executive director of Access Info Europe
Media downsizing has further complicated journalists’ ability to probe beyond the official EU narrative. Other than those at major news organizations and wire services, most correspondents work alone in one-person bureaus to cover diverse and often technical stories. “Instead of having to follow two or three stories now we have 8 to 9 stories to cover at the same time. The priority is to flood the zone with EU messages all the time,” Italian veteran Brussels correspondent Lorenzo Consoli, former president of the International Press Association (IPA), the association of Brussels accredited correspondents, told CPJ. “It is a system which favors the big media, like POLITICO or Bloomberg, which have specialized reporters. It also allows the Commission to sell more easily its messages since most journalists don’t have the time to understand, check and contradict.” Only 20% of Brussels-based journalists cover exclusively EU affairs; most use the city as a hub to cover NATO or other European countries.144
In December 2022, “Qatargate” exploded as one of the EU’s biggest corruption scandals. Eva Kaili, one of 14 vice presidents of the European Parliament, and former MEP Pier Antonio Panzeri were among those145 accused of accepting money from Qatar and Morocco to paint a positive picture of the countries’ poor human rights records. (Qatar and Morocco have denied the allegations.)
The ongoing investigation exposed how, under the current rules of the EU Transparency Register, a database listing organizations that try to influence the law-making and policy implementation process of EU institutions, MEPs were not obliged to make public their meetings with diplomats or agents of third countries – a gaping loophole in the right to public interest information and a blatant contradiction of the parliament’s proclaimed vanguard role in combating foreign interference in the EU.
Five months earlier, the release of the Uber files – an investigation led by the U.K.-based Guardian and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) into European lobbying by the U.S.-based ride-hailing company – had revealed other documentation gaps in the Transparency Register, described by Corporate EU Observatory’s Van Scharen as “often a black box.” According to the investigation, Uber had 12 meetings with European Commission representatives that weren’t publicly disclosed.146
As CPJ noted in its 2015 report, transparency is essential for democratic accountability and for journalists to perform their duty as watchdogs. Yet while access to information over some EU negotiations has improved, it is clear Brussels could take further steps to enhance transparency, including by upholding its own legislation and developing administrative procedures. Overall, expert observers note that the EU doesn’t always meet its own transparency requirements.
Former IPA president Consoli says that EU documents are more accessible than in most member states. “But the definition of what is confidential is questionable. [Take] the discussions with pharmaceutical companies during the COVID-19 crisis. This information is mostly classified although it is clearly in the public interest.”
Helen Darbishire, the executive director of Madrid-based Access Info Europe, has been monitoring the “right to know” in the EU since Regulation 1049/2001147 – the EU law on access to documents – went into force in 2001. She told CPJ that the European Commission “is especially bad” about responding within the 15 working-day time frame after a request for information – a major problem for journalists working on time-sensitive news. “There is fear of criticism within the EU institutions, especially in the current populist context,” she said. “The EU is very self-protective. They don’t seem to see that more transparency might help build trust. It is not a technical question of access. It is about information that citizens need in order to understand what the EU is doing. It is a fundamental right.” Darbishire noted that different EU bodies had different policies on releasing documents. “Frontex [European Border and Coast Guard Agency] for instance, is tougher. Some documents on the decision making or internal discussions in the council are hard to get.”
Documents of EU commissioners’ or MEPs’ expenses for instance, are not released on the grounds of protecting personal data under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or other instruments on privacy.148 When a team of European investigative journalists joined forces in the #RecoveryFiles project to request access to documents about NextGenerationEU, a COVID-19 recovery package of 723.8 billion euros, they found that the European Commission “continues to seize opportunities” to keep records confidential. “Members of the team have faced delays, obstacles or outright obstruction when trying to exercise their European right to access documents related to the fund. While it pays lip service to the value of transparency, the European Commission is refusing to disclose hundreds of documents, using arguments deemed ‘absurd’ or ‘sloppily elaborated’ by experts,”149 two German journalists involved in the project wrote in February 2022.
Nick Aiossa, Transparency International EU’s deputy director, believes the council has been “overzealous” in classifying documents. “Too many are limité [limited use] but when you read them, come on,” he told CPJ. “The European Parliament is horrible in releasing administrative documents, for example on MEPs’ general expenses.” Corporate Europe Observatory’s Van Scharen is equally skeptical about the EU’s pledge of transparency. “Many documents are heavily redacted,” he noted.
Stonewalling and the non-application of the EU’s Court of Justice (CJEU) rulings is another challenge for transparency campaigners. In 2018, Italian lawyer and former European Parliament official Emilio de Capitani won in the EU’s General Court a case about the transparency of three-way legislative negotiations known as trilogues. The case established that these procedures “are legislative in nature and therefore should be accessible to citizens,” wrote POLITICO in January, 2023.150 Four years after the court ruled in his favor, De Capitani told POLITICO, “these legislative preparatory documents covering an essential phase of the legislative negotiations are still kept in the background and it is almost a ‘mission impossible’ for ordinary citizens to obtain them in due time — while lobbyists regularly get them.” According to De Capitani, the parliament’s plenary said in 2011 that these documents should be proactively published, but the Bureau, which determines the way Parliament’s work should be organized, never implemented that change.151
EU communications using mobile phones, including in crucial discussions and negotiations about matters of public interest, are set to fuel ongoing debate around transparency. Alexander Fanta, who covers EU digital policy for the German website netzpolitik.org, requested access to text messages that the Commission’s Von der Leyen exchanged with Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla in early 2021 to negotiate almost 2 billion COVID-19 vaccination doses. The Commission responded that it did not archive text messages because they did not qualify as documents.
The dilemma here is when the battle against disinformation crosses the line into censorship.
In January, 2022, however, EU Ombudsman Emily O’Reilly concluded that these text messages were documents to which the public could request access.152 However, the European Commission refused to budge. “Transparency campaigners and members of the European Parliament are aghast at the implications of this,” Fanta wrote in POLITICO. “By exempting a whole category of content from FOI (Freedom of Information) legislation, the European institutions are creating a massive loophole. And a no-disclosure form of communication will be duly exploited by the likes of fossil-fuel lobbyists, arms traders and governments in Europe and beyond, all who want to keep their dealings with the EU a secret.”153
The case has clear implications for press freedom. In February 2023, POLITICO reported that The New York Times had lodged a case against the European Commission the previous month on the grounds that it had a legal obligation to release the messages.154
On the positive side, some journalists’ associations and newsrooms have praised the EU for its whistleblower directive, which came into force in November 2019155 and which member states must transpose into their national law. “It improves significantly the rights of whistleblowers in Europe,”156 said the influential French freedom of expression group Informer N’est Pas Un Délit (To Inform Is Not A Crime) in June 2021. “Its transposition into French law has been the only progressive law adopted [during] President [Emmanuel] Macron’s first term. It is a real advance,” Mediapart’s co-founder Laurent Mauduit told CPJ.
However, Transparency International notes that the EU directive “unfortunately” does not include a key group of employees: the staff members of the EU institutions, agencies, and bodies157 who might be the best positioned to blow the whistle on corruption or abuses inside the EU institutions. Whistleblowing International Network also warns that delays and ambiguities in member states’ integration of the directive into domestic law could create loopholes for some whistleblowers to be left out.158
Privacy and the EU’s Court of Justice
The Luxembourg-based Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) is the chief judicial authority in the EU overseeing the uniform application and interpretation of EU law by member states. Privacy advocates have applauded some of its work as it plays an increasing role on issues like the defense of privacy. One case in point: the court’s September 2022 decision that the mass retention of phone and internet traffic and location data violated fundamental EU privacy rights – against the opinion of many European law enforcement and government officials who argued that such data retention was vital for fighting crime.159
Other judgments have been less welcome to freedom of expression advocates. The court’s 2014 decision on the “right to be forgotten,” that compelled search engines to remove links to personal information in certain circumstances, for example, has raised concerns about giving too much power to private companies, According to Access Now’s Eliska Pirkova and Estelle Massé, one of the most concerning elements in the court’s reasoning was “the assumption that it should be Google, a privately owned company with multiple online services and a vested interest in having as much information available through its search engine as possible, that ultimately decides what information falls under the scope of ‘public interest’ — or does not.”160 Other critics note that the “right to be forgotten” has also led to the creeping suppression of articles from news websites, equating to a right to remove ”inconvenient journalism.”161
The court has also cited privacy as grounds for refusing journalists’ access to information considered of public interest. In 2018, the General Court denied a request by a group of journalists for access to the monthly expenses of European parliamentarians.162 In November 2022, invoking again the right to privacy and the protection of personal data, the court also invalidated public access to beneficial ownership registers that reveal the names of owners of a company. An EU anti-money laundering directive had granted this access in 2018. Although the ruling stated that journalists and civil society organizations had what the court called a “legitimate interest,”163 the OCCRP (Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project) considered that “it was not good enough,” as “restricting access creates serious new barriers”164 for journalists in consulting the data. Transparency International chair, Delia Ferreira Rubio, described the decision as “the best present that this court has given to organized crime,”165 leading French daily Le Monde to call it a blow to investigative journalism. These databases were “a major tool for journalists” in their investigations of tax evasion and fraud, like OpenLux or the Pandora Papers, Le Monde wrote. As the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) underlined, the European Parliament had passed in October 2021 a resolution “calling on member states to strengthen their beneficial ownership registries — or face penalties if they are lagging behind in implementing existing anti-money laundering regulation.”166 However, the CJEU’s opinion differed with the EU’s parliamentary body and quashed the right to access information of public interest.
The defense of press freedom is part of the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). At least in its rhetoric. The EU, represented by the European External Action Service (EEAS) and most of its member states, can be reliably expected to stand on the side of threatened journalists or more generally on freedom of expression. Initially framed as a human rights issue, press freedom diplomacy was addressed in 2016 “for the first time as a security and foreign policy aspect, and it was channeled through a high-level strategy document” — the Global Strategy for the European Union’s Foreign and Security Policy,167 wrote Raquel Jorge Ricart of the Madrid-based Elcano Royal Institute in December 2022.
In March 2022, the EU Council, acting in the context of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, also approved the Strategic Compass, a plan of action for strengthening the EU’s security and defense policy by 2030. The plan integrates media freedom and pluralism, especially the reinforcement of free and independent media in relation to hybrid threats and foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI).168
Together with other democracies around the world, the EU challenges the strategies of influence developed by Russia and China, especially in Africa and in Latin America. “It must also confront the growing influence of emerging activist states like Saudi Arabia, Qatar or Turkey, especially in Africa and the Middle East, which are offering different models of journalism and of press freedom,” Kamel Labidi, a press freedom expert who has served as a program coordinator for CPJ and as a head of Tunisia’s National Commission to Reform Information and Communication, said in an interview.
The weight of the European Parliament
The European Parliament – the only directly elected EU institution – has been particularly active on press freedom issues. Many of its country-specific resolutions, reports, and hearings have included references to media freedom and challenges facing journalists. A number of parliamentary committees devote special attention to press freedom issues within the EU, including the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE), and the Committee on Culture and Education (CULT), and in non-member states, with the Subcommittee of Human Rights (DROI), part of the Foreign Affairs Committee (AFET). A LIBE working group on rule of law issues, named the LIBE Democracy, Rule of Law and Fundamental Rights Monitoring Group (DRFMG), is conducting hearings and missions on press freedom in EU member states.
The parliament also has the power to set up special committees directly related to press freedom. The Special Committee on Foreign Interference in all Democratic Processes in the European Union, including Disinformation (INGE), underlined the need to protect journalists’ safety and strengthen press freedom and independent reporting as a bulwark against foreign interference targeting the EU in a report published in March 2022. An informal media working group can also act to raise concerns on media freedom. The European Parliament also rewards and amplifies the work of investigative journalists with the Daphne Caruana Galizia Prize for Journalism.140
This EU commitment entails close cooperation with other international institutions, including with the Council of Europe, the OSCE,and the UN.169 In that context it also sees itself as a global norm-setting power. In what Columbia University Law School’s Anu Bradford calls the “Brussels effect,” this implies “the ability to promulgate regulations that shape the global business environment, elevating standards worldwide and leading to a notable Europeanization of many important aspects of global commerce.”170 This effect has been particularly obvious in the digital realm, and therefore in the definition of free speech. “The EU has drawn the line between acceptable and unacceptable speech in the internet era—not just in Europe but around the world,” Bradford writes.
As Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen told the EU, the Digital Services Act could become a “global gold standard”171 in content moderation. “The EU has the capacity to make things change, even in the U.S., like it did on data protection,” said French Green MEP Gwendoline Delbos Corfield.172
However, some groups have challenged the EU’s role as a global norm setter on such issues as the right to be forgotten and what some claim to be the negative threat of the Digital Services Act.173
Driven by the official line that human rights is the “silver thread” of its diplomacy, the EEAS has developed a broad range of policies and initiatives, which since July 2014 have been rooted in the EU Human Rights Guidelines on Freedom of Expression Online and Offline.174 A digest of EU principles and policies on these matters, they were designed in particular to help the 140 EU delegations and offices around the world in their interactions with local journalists and authorities to defend freedom of expression. The Media4Democracy project, a EU-funded technical assistance facility, was one such project set up in 2017 to strengthen the EU Delegations’ ability to implement the EU Guidelines.175 In July 2020 it was complemented by an EU Delegation handbook on journalists’ safety.176
Josep Borrell, the EEAS high representative for foreign affairs and security policy and a vice president of the European Commission, regularly publishes public statements in support of journalists in non-EU countries and press freedom is on the agenda at multiple meetings – including human rights dialogues – between EU officials and third countries.
Funding, again, is a key instrument. The European Union has developed a system of external financial assistance – including for journalists – through the European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights (EIDHR), which broadly seeks to support and promote human rights in non-EU countries. The EIDHR finances ProtectDefenders.eu, an EU mechanism managed by a consortium of 12 NGOs that provides for emergency support and financing, including shelter programs, as well as for protective equipment and assistance for human rights defenders in hostile environments around the world. It organizes trial observation, manages a 24/7 hotline for human rights defenders in danger, and covers legal fees for journalists. Global Europe, the EU program for external action funds for 2021-2027, also supports media-related projects, a need outlined in the EU Action Plan on Human Rights and Democracy 2020-2024,177 which also calls for the protection of journalists and the fight against impunity. “In the last 12 months, the EU has supported more than 400 journalists with emergency grants, temporary relocation, or support to their respective media outlets,”178 said the European Commission in late 2021.
The EU helps with financial support for United Nations special rapporteurs, in particular the rapporteur on the promotion and protection of freedom of opinion and expression. It also funds the European Endowment for Democracy (EED), an autonomous international trust fund which works in the so-called “European Neighbourhood,”179 as well as the Western Balkans and Turkey, and, among other actions, supports independent media platforms and journalists. Its asset is that it can work directly with journalists independently of EU delegations. Among its recent grantees: the Ukrainian investigative outlet Slidstvo.Info, which collects evidence of Russian war crimes in Ukraine, and the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression.