Two separate reports by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and the European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) highlighted that most murders of journalists remain unsolved and the perpetrators go unpunished.
Syria ranks highest in impunity
A report by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), which presents the statistics on impunity for the murders of journalists that it has been tracking for more than thirty years, said that since 1 September 2013, when the United Nations declared the ‘Day to Combat Impunity for Crimes against Journalists’, about 80% of the murders remain unsolved. According to the report, 261 journalists worldwide have been killed for their work in the last 10 years, 204 of them with complete impunity.
According to CPJ’s 2023 Global Impunity Index, Syria is the leading country where journalists are killed in retaliation for their reporting and their killers remain free. Syria has the world’s worst record for solving journalist murders over the past 10 years, with all 14 murders of journalists going unpunished.
48 murders of journalists in Europe went unpunished
Meanwhile, the European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) released a special report on the day. According to the report, 48 murders and killings of journalists in 13 European countries went unpunished.
The list, which includes Turkey, includes “16 murders of journalists in Kosovo, 7 in Russia, 6 in Ukraine, 6 in Turkey, 3 in Serbia, 2 in Greece, 2 in Azerbaijan, 1 in Slovakia, 1 in Malta, 1 in Serbia, 1 in the UK, 1 in Cyprus, 1 in Montenegro and 1 in Belarus”. The EFJ called on states to take concrete steps to end impunity for these crimes.
The murders of journalists in Turkey in the report are as follows
Uğur Mumcu (Turkey, 1993)
Hrant Dink (Turkey, 2007)
Naji Jerf (Turkey, 2015)
Rohat Aktaş (Turkey, 2016)
Saaed Karimian (Turkey, 2017)
Jamal Khashoggi (Turkey, 2018)