JournalismPakistan.com
October 30, 2018

NEW YORK -  Pakistan has shown improvement on the Global Impunity Index, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists that released its 2018 findings on Monday.

The eleventh annual report highlights countries where journalists are murdered regularly and their killers go free.

Pakistan is ranked 9 on the index this year, improving from being No. 7 in 2017. The country has 18 unsolved cases of journalists’ murders and has been on the index for 11 years.

The CPJ says that a lack of justice in the murders of journalists creates an entrenched climate of censorship.

All 14 of the countries featured this year have appeared multiple times on the index since CPJ began collecting data in 2008, and half have appeared every year. In the past decade, at least 324 journalists have been silenced through murder worldwide and in 85 percent of these cases, no perpetrators have been convicted.

"The fact that impunity continues to thrive in many of these countries year after year is a disturbing sign of how deeply rooted the problem is. Impunity is an effective way to silence journalists and creates a void of information," said Elisabeth Witchel, author of the report and CPJ's consultant for the Global Campaign Against Impunity. "Governments must treat these cases as a priority and provide appropriate mechanisms to achieve justice for these journalists and their families."

For the fourth year in a row, Somalia tops the list. Countries returning to the 2018 index after an absence include Afghanistan, where a suicide attacker targeted a group of journalists earlier this year, killing nine, and Colombia, where alleged drug traffickers kidnapped an Ecuadoran news crew and murdered them in Colombian territory.

The Impunity Index is released annually to mark the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists on November 2. CPJ calculates the number of unsolved journalist murders as a percentage of each country's population. For this index, CPJ examined journalist murders that occurred between September 1, 2008, and August 31, 2018.