Defending our rights is becoming deadlier

The harassment, detention, torture, and eventual murder in 2006 of Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian investigative journalist who exposed government corruption, the horrors of the Second Chechen War, and the increasingly autocratic regime of Russian President Vladimir Putin, is the subject of a new film, Words of War.

- Jodie Ginsberg

This tribute to Politkovskaya’s courage was released in the United States on the eve of World Press Freedom Day a day intended to celebrate a pillar of democracy. But for me, the day has increasingly become one of mourning rather than celebration, because what happened to Politkovskaya is becoming the norm.

My organization, the Committee to Protect Journalists, found that 2024 was the profession’s deadliest year since the CPJ began collecting data in 1992: at least 124 journalists and media workers were killed, two-thirds of them Palestinians killed by Israel. Moreover, 361 journalists were in jail, a near-record high that reflects the growing efforts to criminalize journalism and journalists not only in autocracies but also in supposed democracies, or those that until very recently - enjoyed a relatively free press.

In Hong Kong, the 77-year-old British media entrepreneur Jimmy Lai languishes in prison on national-security charges. Lai, the founder of the pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily, has been largely held in solitary confinement for the past four years and, if convicted, will almost certainly die behind bars.