The very large number of journalists who are in prison around the world sheds a lot of light on the current dangers for media freedom, says Katja Gloger, president of the German section of Reporters Without Borders.
"Too many governments react to protests, irregularities or crises like a pandemic with reprisals against the 'messengers of bad news,'" she adds.
In the first part of the annual balance published this Monday, we are talking about the arrested, abducted and missing persons.
By the beginning of December, there were 387 media workers in prisons.
The second part of the balance sheet will be published at the end of the year - it will contain the number of journalists killed.
"Behind each of these individual cases is the fate of a man who is threatened with criminal prosecution, long-term imprisonment and often abuse because he did not submit to censorship and repression," Gloger is concerned.
Drastic consequences
Silvi Arens-Urbane from Reporter cites concrete examples from Africa when it comes to reporting on the pandemic.
Well-known journalist Hopewell Chinono from Zimbabwe investigated the government's sale of overpriced covid-19 drugs.
He spent a month and a half in prison, and his request for release on bail was repeatedly rejected.
When the coronavirus began to spread faster and faster, three times more journalists ended up in prison in Africa from mid-March to mid-May than in the same period a year earlier, says Arens-Urbane.
By the end of November, 40 of them were arrested for, she points out, "reporting on the pandemic".
Currently, Egypt is the African country with the largest number of jailed journalists, 30 of them.
At the world top of that infamous list is China (117).
The total number of journalists in prison as of December 1 was 387.
That is, admittedly, less than in the record-breaking last year, when that number grew for the third time in a row.
Increasingly, women are ending up in prisons because of their work as journalists.
There are currently 42 female journalists in prison, which is 35 percent more than last year. There are the most of them, four each, in Belarus and Iran.
At the beginning of the year, Serbian journalist Ana Lalić was also briefly detained, also for reporting on the situation in hospitals during the pandemic.
The prosecutor's office later dropped the criminal charges against her.
The most famous European prisoner, Julian Assange
The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, is still in prison in Great Britain awaiting a decision on his extradition to the United States of America (USA), which should be made in early January.
In the current report of Reporters without Borders, it is written that the conditions in the prison for him in the age of corona "deteriorated significantly".
The possibility of infection and the consequences of isolation represent a "life-threatening risk" considering his "ultimate mental and physical health."
Reporters are also worried about kidnapped and missing journalists.
The fate of one journalist each from Mozambique, Congo, Peru and Iraq is unknown.
54 reporters are currently in the hands of the kidnappers, in three countries where civil war is raging: in Syria, Iraq and Yemen.
Reporters Without Borders is engaged in various ways in the release of imprisoned, kidnapped and missing persons.
In the case of Iranian blogger Ruholah Zam without success.
He was executed last Saturday.
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