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Where Journalists’ Killers Go Free

By Katie Paul

It’s no surprise that journalism can be dangerous work. Reporters are routinely killed on assignment in conflict areas or covering other hazardous parts of the world. But what about those killed not in the course of their work but because of their work?

Like 54-year-old Philip Agustin, whose newspaper was about to publish a special edition on missing government funds in the Philippines when he was shot in the back of the head at his daughter’s home on May 10, 2005. Or Bautista Merino, 24, and Martínez Sánchez, 20, the hosts of a local radio station in Mexico’s tumultuous southern state of Oaxaca, who were driving home on a rural highway on April 7, 2008, when they were gunned down by unidentified assailants wielding assault rifles. Or Mahad Ahmed Elmi, a Somali morning talk show host shot dead outside the entrance of his radio station’s building as he arrived for work on Aug. 11, 2007. Later that day Elmi’s colleague Ali Iman Sharmarke was killed by a remote-controlled bomb that detonated under his car as he was returning from Elmi’s funeral.

No one has ever been convicted of these killings. Nor has anyone been brought to justice in 23 other cases of journalist murder in the Philippines, in seven in Mexico and in five in Somalia. And these are only a fraction of the more than 500 murders of journalists, specifically because of their reporting, since 1992, the year the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) began keeping detailed death records. While past awareness campaigns have looked at press freedom issues more broadly, the CPJ today came out with an Impunity Index to focus the spotlight squarely on those countries whose governments have consistently failed to solve these murders.

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Predictably, war-torn countries top the listwith Iraq in a category all its own, at 79 unsolved cases. Sierra Leone, Somalia, and Colombia follow in second, third, and fourth place. But what’s less predictable is that even in countries where mortar fire is a way of life, the overwhelming majority of journalists killed in the line of duty are felled not as unintended casualties of stray bullets but as targets. In fact, the CPJ says, the risk of being outright murdered because of one’s reporting is journalism’s number one hazard, responsible for 70 percent of all work-related deaths in the profession. What’s more, the majority of the 13 countries that made the ignominious list are not war-torn at all but established democracies, like Mexico and India, that have fully functioning law enforcement institutions.

“We wanted to focus on what we believe is the greatest single threat to journalists around the world and devise an index that was as objective as possible,” said Joel Simon, CPJ’s executive director. “So, as we go out and publicize this, what we’re basically saying to governments that might be embarrassed is, You can’t really argue with these numbers. The only way you can improve your ranking on this index is to solve these crimes’.”

Some of the murderslike the killing in Pakistan of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, or the shooting in Russia of investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya and American editor Paul Klebnikovdo attract international attention. But many of the slain journalists remain unknown and unheralded. Simon notes that over 85 percent of those murdered are local reporters whose investigative work often earns them the ire of the people they cover and who cannot up and leave when they are threatened. And when governments don’t look very hard to find or charge the killers, their actions set a chilling precedent for other reporters working in troubled spots. That’s a precedent the CPJ hopes its new report can counter.