Reporters Without Borders: Belarus Is Most Dangerous Country In Europe For Journalists

Accord­ing to the RWB experts, Belarus is one of the coun­tries that exper­i­ment­ed with a rad­i­cal treat­ment for silenc­ing jour­nal­ists – total inter­net shut­downs with the help of cyber-secu­ri­ty soft­ware. The inter­net was com­plete­ly inac­ces­si­ble for three days after the con­tro­ver­sial results of the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion were announced, and then inter­mit­tent­ly in the fol­low­ing months. Accord­ing to the #KeepI­tOn coali­tion, which mon­i­tors inter­net shut­downs, the inter­net was shut down for a total of 121 days from August to Decem­ber 2020 in Belarus.

“With cen­sor­ship, mass arrests, harass­ment and vio­lence, jour­nal­ists work­ing for inde­pen­dent media were specif­i­cal­ly tar­get­ed by the police fol­low­ing the fraud­u­lent pres­i­den­tial elec­tion on 9 August 2020. Arrest­ed while cov­er­ing protests or to pre­vent them from cov­er­ing protests, jour­nal­ists were ini­tial­ly giv­en short “admin­is­tra­tive” jail sen­tences on spu­ri­ous grounds.

The author­i­ties lat­er began to bring crim­i­nal charges against them that were pun­ish­able by sev­er­al years in prison, and to con­duct sham tri­als chaired by polit­i­cal­ly pli­able judges. In their deter­mi­na­tion to crush all inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ism, the police also began harass­ing its defend­ers, espe­cial­ly the Belaru­sian Asso­ci­a­tion of Jour­nal­ists (BAJ), RSF’s local part­ner.”

The 2021 World Press Free­dom Index shows that jour­nal­ism, the main vac­cine against dis­in­for­ma­tion, is com­plete­ly or part­ly blocked in 73% of the 180 coun­tries ranked by the organ­i­sa­tion. It notes dra­mat­ic dete­ri­o­ra­tion in people’s access to infor­ma­tion and an increase in obsta­cles to news cov­er­age. Mean­while, Nor­way is ranked first in the Index for the fifth year run­ning even though its media have com­plained of a lack of access to state-held infor­ma­tion about the pan­dem­ic. Fin­land main­tained its posi­tion in sec­ond place while Swe­den (up 1 at 3rd) recov­ered its third-place rank­ing, which it had yield­ed to Den­mark (down 1 at 4th) last year.

This year, only 12 of the Index’s 180 coun­tries (7%) can claim to offer a favourable envi­ron­ment for jour­nal­ism, as opposed to 13 coun­tries (8%) last year. The coun­try to have been stripped of its “good” clas­si­fi­ca­tion is Ger­many (down 2 at 13th). Dozens of its jour­nal­ists were attacked by sup­port­ers of extrem­ist and con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry believ­ers dur­ing protests against pan­dem­ic restric­tions. The press free­dom sit­u­a­tion in Ger­many is nonethe­less still clas­si­fied as “fair­ly good,” as is the case in the Unit­ed States (down 1 at 44th).

Chi­na (177th), which con­tin­ues to take Inter­net cen­sor­ship, sur­veil­lance and pro­pa­gan­da to unprece­dent­ed lev­els, is still firm­ly anchored among the Index’s worst coun­tries, which are indi­cat­ed in black on the World Press Free­dom map. Right below Chi­na is the same trio of total­i­tar­i­an coun­tries that have his­tor­i­cal­ly occu­pied the bot­tom three places. Two are Asian: Turk­menistan (up 1 at 178th) and North Korea (up 1 at 179th). The third is African: Eritrea (down 2 at 180th). Regard­less of their con­ti­nent, these coun­tries main­tain absolute con­trol over all news and infor­ma­tion.