We have a lot to be sombre about on the occasion of the UN’s International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists, marked on November 2 each year since 2013. The day is intended to highlight crimes against journalists. Motives for these crimes vary from action by state agencies, criminal gangs, mafias or from conflict and war – with reporters and camerapersons invariably at the front line. To end such crimes, it is essential that those responsible be penalized under the law. We can see that this does not always happen in our own country. In fact, most often, it does not happen at all. In 2005, Hayatullah Khan was kidnapped in North Waziristan, and his body found six months later handcuffed and mutilated. Despite protests led by his small children, we still do not know who put the reporter to death. The same is true in other cases, including that of Saleem Shahzad murdered in Islamabad in 2011, as well as the near-fatal attack on Geo’s Hamid Mir. Add to that the long list of journalists that are threatened, abducted, assaulted just for doing their jobs.
Pakistan is often described as a dangerous place for journalists and most of those killed or threatened are reporters who struggle to make ends meet and work in the most dangerous parts of the country. Added to that, over the years militant organisations have also publicly named news organisations as targets and made hit-lists of prominent journalists. Until governments start respecting the role the media plays in such trying circumstances, journalists around the world will continue to pay the ultimate price for doing their jobs. Unfortunately, in Pakistan we have seen the exact opposite. Journalists continue to report threats from a number of sources, the most glaring being the state itself. A report by Pakistani media rights watchdog the Freedom Network says that one-third of the journalists facing legal cases filed mainly by the Pakistani state are at risk of being charged under the Anti-Terrorism Law. As per the study, print media practitioners are twice as likely to be the target of legal action that television media practitioners. In fact, just in the recent past we have seen two high-profile cases of journalists being abducted, journalists being charged under the regressive Peca laws, as well as the ongoing incarceration of Jang/Geo Editor-in-Chief Mir Shakil-ur-Rahman.
The UN has often called on states to take greater steps to protect journalists amidst armed conflict but also where there is no such conflict. A society where journalists continue to be silenced with impunity is a society that is afraid of asking critical questions. Pakistan must reaffirm its commitment to the safety of journalists by not only solving the unsolved murders of journalists in the country but also the unresolved – and continuing – series of mysterious abductions of journalists; the consistent use of state institutions to target journalists by using defamation or Peca laws; and the crippling censorship – which counts as a serious crime against the craft of journalism
https://www.thenews.com.pk/print/737584-journalists-in-danger
Journalists in danger: edit in The News, Nov 2, 2020
We have a lot to be sombre about on the occasion of the UN’s International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists, marked on November 2 each year since 2013. The day is intended to highlight crimes against journalists. Motives for these crimes vary from action by state agencies, criminal gangs, mafias or from conflict and war – with reporters and camerapersons invariably at the front line. To end such crimes, it is essential that those responsible be penalized under the law. We can see that this does not always happen in our own country. In fact, most often, it does not happen at all. In 2005, Hayatullah Khan was kidnapped in North Waziristan, and his body found six months later handcuffed and mutilated. Despite protests led by his small children, we still do not know who put the reporter to death. The same is true in other cases, including that of Saleem Shahzad murdered in Islamabad in 2011, as well as the near-fatal attack on Geo’s Hamid Mir. Add to that the long list of journalists that are threatened, abducted, assaulted just for doing their jobs.
Pakistan is often described as a dangerous place for journalists and most of those killed or threatened are reporters who struggle to make ends meet and work in the most dangerous parts of the country. Added to that, over the years militant organisations have also publicly named news organisations as targets and made hit-lists of prominent journalists. Until governments start respecting the role the media plays in such trying circumstances, journalists around the world will continue to pay the ultimate price for doing their jobs. Unfortunately, in Pakistan we have seen the exact opposite. Journalists continue to report threats from a number of sources, the most glaring being the state itself. A report by Pakistani media rights watchdog the Freedom Network says that one-third of the journalists facing legal cases filed mainly by the Pakistani state are at risk of being charged under the Anti-Terrorism Law. As per the study, print media practitioners are twice as likely to be the target of legal action that television media practitioners. In fact, just in the recent past we have seen two high-profile cases of journalists being abducted, journalists being charged under the regressive Peca laws, as well as the ongoing incarceration of Jang/Geo Editor-in-Chief Mir Shakil-ur-Rahman.
The UN has often called on states to take greater steps to protect journalists amidst armed conflict but also where there is no such conflict. A society where journalists continue to be silenced with impunity is a society that is afraid of asking critical questions. Pakistan must reaffirm its commitment to the safety of journalists by not only solving the unsolved murders of journalists in the country but also the unresolved – and continuing – series of mysterious abductions of journalists; the consistent use of state institutions to target journalists by using defamation or Peca laws; and the crippling censorship – which counts as a serious crime against the craft of journalism
https://www.thenews.com.pk/print/737584-journalists-in-danger
Published in Pak Media comment and Pakistan