In record year, China, Israel, and Myanmar are world’s leading jailers of journalists - Committee to Protect Journalists 1/24/25, 10:29 AM Journalist Viktoria Roshchina disappeared while covering Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine. (Photo: Courtesy Hromadske) Russia held 30 journalists behind bars at the time of CPJ’s census. Almost half are Ukrainian, victims of Russia’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea and Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Ukrainian journalist Viktoria Roshchina died in Russian custody in September – a grim reminder of the plight of journalists detained incommunicado in Russian-held territories on undisclosed charges. Russian occupying authorities continued to jail Crimean Tatars, the peninsula’s predominantly Muslim indigenous ethnic group, for their civic journalism. Some have been imprisoned for years in prisons thousands of miles from their homes and families, restricted in their communication, and sometimes given food with pork in contravention of their religious beliefs. Russia also took its transnational repression to new levels in 2024. Authorities ramped up their harassment of exiled journalists and foreign correspondents with a slew of in absentia sentences or arrest warrants – an intimidatory tactic that’s not re$ected in CPJ’s census data because the journalists aren’t in jail, but serves as a chilling illustration of Moscow’s determination to control the narrative of its war in Ukraine. Regional repression https://cpj.org/thematic-reports/in-record-year-china-israel-and-myanmar-are-worlds-leading-jailers-of-journalists/ Page 13 of 27