PRESS FREEDOM IN 2007 (Summary from HREA Newsletter )

Press release Reporters Without Borders.
2 January 2008
In 2007:
86 journalists and 20 media assistants were killed.
887 arrested.
1,511 physically attacked or threatened.
67 journalists kidnapped.
528 media outlets censored.
On line:
37 bloggers were arrested.
21 physically attacked.
2,676 websites shut down or suspended.
In 2006:
85 journalists and 32 media assistants were killed.
871 arrested.
1,472 physically attacked or threatened.
56 journalists kidnapped.
912 media outlets censored.
The number of journalists killed has risen 244% in five years.
At least 86 journalists killed around the world in 2007.The figure has risen steadily since 2002- from 25 to 86 (+244%)- and is the highest since 1994, when 103 journalists were killed, nearly half of them in the Rwanda genocide, about 20 in Algeria's civil war and a dozen in the former Yugoslavia.
More than half those killed in 2007 died in Iraq.
Response of Reporters Without Borders: No country has ever seen more journalists killed than Iraq, with at least 207 media workers dying there since the March 2003 US invasion- more than in the Vietnam War, the fighting in ex- Yugoslavia, the massacres in Algeria or the Rwanda genocide.
At least two journalists arrested each day in 2007.
135 journalists were in prison around the world on 1 January 2008 and the figure has hardly shrunk for several years.
China(with 33 in jail) and Cuba (24) have been the world's two biggest prisons for journalists over the past four years. Their governments free one every now and then, at the end of their sentences, but others replace them immediately.
More than 2,600 websites and blogs shut down.
The governments of China, Burma and Syria are trying to turn the Internet into an Intranet- a network limited to traffic inside the country between people authorised to participate. At least 2,676 websites were shut down or suspended around the world in 2007, most of them discussion forums.
During the October 2007 demonstrations by Buddhist monks in Burma, the country's military rulers tried to block the flow of news being e-mailed out of the country by cutting off Internet access. Censorship ranged from antigovernment sites to all means of communication, including film cameras, ordinary cameras and mobile phones.
Response of Reporters Without Borders:'' Some countries censor the Internet as much as they do the traditional media and China is the world champion here.Its cyber-police have been very active before every major political occasion,notably in the months before the 2007 Communist Party congress when about 2,500 websites and blogs, many of them political,were blocked.''
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