Sixteen of the 27 journalists murdered around the world so far this year have been victims of Israeli attacks, denounced the NGO Press Emblem Campaign (PEC) on the eve of World Press Freedom Day, which is celebrated this Sunday, May 3.
“It is regrettable that a single government, supposedly a democracy, is responsible for almost two-thirds of the victims, which demonstrates an unacceptable lack of respect for civil life and the independence of the media,” the president of PEC, Blaise Lempen, stressed in a statement.
The head of the NGO, which keeps up-to-date monitoring of attacks on journalists around the world, added that many of these attacks are deliberate, so they could be considered war crimes.
PEC stressed that the pretexts used by Israel, which maintains that some of these murdered journalists were affiliated with Hamas or Hezbollah, “do not justify their elimination if they were not acting as combatants.”
According to the organization, these crimes remain uninvestigated, increasing impunity that encourages future murders, while restrictions on international press access to the Gaza Strip continue.
Specifically, 17 journalists murdered so far this year are linked to the conflict in the Middle East: nine in Lebanon, six in Gaza, one in Iran and another in Syria.
In the rest of the world, PEC has recorded five fatalities in Latin America (two in Mexico, the same number in Venezuela and one in Guatemala), and also cases in Bangladesh, Somalia, the Philippines, Uganda and India.
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, also remembered the world day with a statement in which he recognized that journalism “has become an unsafe and sometimes dangerous profession.”
Türk regretted that in the last 20 years only one in 10 murders of journalists has been tried and convicted, and stressed that Israel’s war in Gaza has been a special “death trap” for the media, with almost 300 journalists killed since the start of the conflict in October 2023.
He also recalled that some 330 journalists and media workers remain detained around the world for carrying out their work.
“The press is the oxygen of a free and open society, it fuels public debate and can generate trust, supporting social cohesion, resilience and security,” summarized the United Nations human rights chief.
