Impunity index reveals more journalist killings in two African Countries

CPJ Executive Director Mr. Joel Simon

THE Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) in the world reports that over the last 15years, at least 500 journalists in the world were killed in direct relation to their journalistic work. CPJ also reports that in less than 15 percent of cases the perpetrators have been brought to justice. Sierra Leone and Somalia hold the second and third worst records after Iraq, where 9 and 5 cases, respectively, remain unsolved.
CPJ is striving to raise awareness about the governments, most of which are even democratic, around the world that allow murders with impunity as a tactic to silence the press. CPJ compiled an impunity index and timely released it before World Press Freedom Day (3rd May 2008, an annual occasion celebrated by journalists in the world), to further its campaign to bring justice to journalists who have been killed. The index was devised by calculating the number of unsolved journalist murders, from 1998 through 2007, as a percentage of the country’s population for every nation in the world.
"Every time a journalist is murdered and the killer is allowed to walk free it sends a terrible signal to the press and to others who would harm journalists," said CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon. In Sierra Leone and Somalia, where a morass of conflict has claimed scores of lives, the number of unsolved cases of journalist murders is indicative of larger trends threatening the independence of the press and safety of media practitioners. In Sierra Leone a protracted 11-year civil war, which ended in 2002, nearly collapsed the country and took a large toll on the independent media. Recently, some have suggested that the media in the country has grown. However, what this growth entails is subject to debate. In Somalia, CPJ reports that the press has been sacrificed in large part due to the competing warlords that have run the country since 1991 and the central government that was installed in late 2006 by Ethiopian troops. CPJ is in part filling that role in its fight to push governments all around the world, from Iraq to Sri Lanka to Mexico, to embrace liability in place of impunity in the face of crimes committed against journalists.