Bangladesh has fallen into a list of 13 countries which account for 80 per cent of global cases of killing journalists with impunity in the past decade.
Seven Bangladesh journalists were killed in the decade with “complete impunity”, said the 2016 global impunity index published by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) on Thursday.
However, Bangladesh has been one of the six countries that convicted perpetrators of journalist killings during the entire period.
“Despite some arrests, only one murder from the past decade has been fully prosecuted,” the CPJ said in the report’s Bangladesh chapter, terming such development a setback.
In most cases, according to the report, members of the extremist and criminal groups were responsible for the killing of journalists in most of the listed countries.
It pointed out that extremist groups had repeatedly targeted journalists with impunity in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Pakistan, which all appear on the index for at least the second consecutive year.
In rank order (with the numbers of unsolved murders in brackets) they are: 1. Somalia (24); 2. Iraq (71); 3. Syria (17); 4. Philippines (41); 5. South Sudan (5); 6. Mexico (21); 7. Afghanistan (5); 8. Pakistan (21); 9. Brazil (15); 10. Russia (9); 11. Bangladesh (7); 12. Nigeria (5); and 13. India (13).
“Impunity is widely recognised as one of the greatest threats to press freedom, and international pressure to address it has mounted in recent years, with states, including some of the repeat offenders on this list, beginning to respond,” observed the report.
It added, more countries on this year’s index participated in UNESCO’s impunity accountability mechanism, which requested information on the status of investigations into killed journalists for the UN agency’s biennial report on journalist safety.
This year, only three states among the 13 index countries-India, South Sudan, and Syria-failed to respond.
Full justice, including prosecution of the masterminds, been achieved in only 3 per cent of total murder cases globally over the decade, said the report.
Source: Prothom Alo
