In record year, China, Israel, and Myanmar are world’s leading jailers of journalists - Committee to Protect Journalists 1/24/25, 10:29 AM Russia rounded out the top "ve, with CPJ documenting its second-highest number of journalists behind bars – a global total of at least 361 journalists incarcerated on December 1, 2024. A police o!cer (left) stands at the entrance of a prison in western China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in April 2021. Blindfolded Palestinian prisoners detained in Gaza are seen at a military detention facility in southern Israel in winter 2023 (center), and a view outside of Insein prison in Yangon, Myanmar, as relatives wait for the release of prisoners on January 4, 2024. (Photos, from left: AP/Mark Schiefelbein; Breaking the Silence via AP; AFP) While that number falls slightly below the global record set in 2022, when at least 370 journalists were imprisoned in connection with their work, CPJ recorded unprecedented totals in several countries including China, Israel, Tunisia, and Azerbaijan. "e primary drivers of journalist imprisonment in 2024 – a year that saw more than 100 new jailings – were ongoing authoritarian repression (China, Myanmar, Vietnam, Belarus, Russia), war (Israel, Russia), and political or economic instability (Egypt, Nicaragua, Bangladesh). China, Myanmar, Belarus, and Russia routinely rank among the top jailers of journalists. Israel, a multiparty parliamentary democracy that rarely appeared in CPJ’s annual prison census before the 2023 start of the war in Gaza, catapulted to second-place last year as it tried to silence coverage from the occupied Palestinian territories. Yet while circumstances varied from region to region and country to country, all jailers followed a dispiritingly similar tactical playbook. https://cpj.org/thematic-reports/in-record-year-china-israel-and-myanmar-are-worlds-leading-jailers-of-journalists/ Page 2 of 27