According to Reporters Without Borders, an average of five Pakistani journalists have been killed in the line of duty every year since 2012. Data released by the Pakistani government on Friday, 42 journalists have been killed in the last four years, Dawn reported.
Pakistan’s Parliamentary Affairs Minister Morteza Javed Abbasi told the Senate on Friday that these deaths include journalists who were shot dead, targeted, killed by terrorists, and untraceables.
According to the report, 15 of the 42 journalists killed were from Punjab province, 11 from Sindh, 13 from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and three from Balochistan. The country’s opposition Jamaat-e-Islami party said the data showed that Pakistan’s federal and provincial governments had failed to protect journalists.
According to Reporters Without Borders, an average of five Pakistani journalists have been killed each year since 2012. Last year, the organization’s World Press Freedom Index ranked Pakistan 157th out of 180 countries.
“Of the 53 journalists killed in 2012-22, only two of their killers have been convicted,” the Pakistan Freedom Network said in its 2022 report. “The penal system has failed to deliver justice for journalists, either because criminal complaints were not registered, police investigations were not completed, cases were found unfit for trial, trials were not completed, or suspected killers were not convicted.”
Press Freedom in India
It is also noteworthy that India ranks 150th in the World Press Freedom Index for 2022, just seven places above Pakistan. India was ranked 142nd in 2021. Reporters Without Borders cited “violence against journalists, politically biased media, and concentration of media ownership” as reasons for stating that media freedom is in crisis in India.
“Originally a product of the anti-colonial movement, the Indian press used to be seen as fairly progressive, but things changed radically in the mid-2010s when Narendra Modi became prime minister and his party, the BJP, and the big families that dominate the media became considerably closer,” Reporters Without Borders said.
In December, the Committee to Protect Journalists also expressed concern over the arrest of seven journalists in India. The Committee targeted the Jammu and Kashmir Public Safety Act, a preventive detention law under which journalists Aasif Sultan, Fahad Shah and Sajad Gul are being held in jail despite being granted bail by the courts in separate cases.
The Jammu and Kashmir Public Safety Act allows authorities to detain persons in custody without trial for up to two years to prevent them from acting in any manner prejudicial to the “security of the state or maintenance of public order”.