Most first responders, including military personnel and medical assistance, are heavily protected in areas of conflict in developing countries, but journalists, despite the risks they take for the global community, are robbed of basic human rights. Since 1992, 1249 journalists have been murdered and there was a 50 percent increase in journalist deaths worldwide in 2022, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CJP 2022). Additionally, according to UNESCO, only 10 percent of perpetrators of these crimes have been charged, and in some countries like Colombia, less than 1 percent have been charged (UNESCO 2016). These staggering statistics show a need for change as current international protocol proves insufficient. To maintain the integrity of international journalism, states and supranational organizations need to collaborate to ensure protection for reporters in conflict areas and developing countries. 

Currently, international humanitarian measures have not held national entities accountable, and governments around the world are to blame for the persecution of journalists. The Council of Europe, UN, and UNESCO have developed precise standards to help member states uphold their obligations to protect journalists covering conflict and in 2006 and 2015 the Security Council adopted resolutions which called for an end to intentional attacks against journalists in situations of armed conflict. But, according to the Council of Europe Commission for Human Rights… “the reality on the ground differs greatly from these standards. In armed conflicts, journalists are often subject to deliberate attacks, kidnapping and torture (CECHR) .” 

In countries like Colombia, where in the last four years, eight journalists have been killed, and 618 have received threats against their lives, according to the Foundation for Press Freedom (FLIP), a watchdog group that advocates for press freedom in Latin America, the government is directly to blame for many of the crimes committed against journalists. An academic journal by a notable investigative journalist in Bogata reported, “The Colombian journalists who covered the national strike endured physical intimidation, violence, legal threats, surveillance, and stigmatization as the government clamped down on a movement they painted as being driven by “vandals,” “guerillas,” “foreign infiltrators,” and “Castro-Chavista communists.” This historical trend of systematic violence against the press has been exasperated by the presence of a notorious riot-response police force in recent civil uprises. 

Other actors are involved in violence against journalists besides the government, including violence with cultural ties. In areas like Bajo Cauca, Colombia, anti-press violence is an inherent part of the social structures, for neo-paramilitary groups and gangs, even among communities that maintain a sense of respect for journalism. According to an academic journal by a fellow at the Colombian Observatory of Organised Crime in Bogotá, “APV in Mexico is the result of targeted and political efforts to silence reporters, but in Bajo Cauca, journalists are not systematically targeted because of their job. In fact, neo-paramilitaries can respect the role of journalism in society, an idea that is developed in the subsequent section of this article. Individual journalists are targeted when they are perceived ‘to snitch’, just as any other of their fel-low citizens: "It doesn't matter if it’s a reporter, teacher or prosecutor.” In this sense, their moral code obstructs their view of the press and a cultural acceptance of violence allows them to commit these crimes. 

There are other cultural factors that weigh into violence against journalists.Indigenous journalism is not considered to the same degree of respect as mainstream journalism. Indigenous journalists are explicitly targeted in conflict zones, and are faced with serious threats in their everyday work. According to an academic journal by a professor of Journalism at OsloMet, threats against indigenous journalists coincide with the pursuit of Latin American governments to limit indigenous speech overall, because they play an increasingly vital role in uncovering the vast scale of legal and illegal exploitation of natural resources, forests, and land in the region. This paper referenced that without the proper scaffolding of a large media corporation and targeted attention from active government officials, indigenous reporters in areas of Latin America are attacked, stations have been damaged in guerrilla attacks on police stations, and the judicial system has disproportionately brought justice to crimes against indigenous reporters. For example, in 2012, Reporters Without Borders, an international non-profit with the stated aim of safeguarding the right to freedom of information, found that a newly adopted law discriminated against indigenous community media in Guatemala. 

Another cultural facet of crimes against journalists lies in the fact that female reporters face many different forms of harassment when serving in conflict zones. A research article by Oslo Metropolitan University found 1,000 women journalists studied support the claim that sexual violence is frequently used to silence and intimidate women journalists, and adds that women are additionally exposed to attacks because their work challenges gender stereotypes. Most of the threats to women (according to male and female informants for this article) consist of sexual harassment and verbal threats, abduction, rape and capture into forced “marriage”, which happens especially when covering local conflict in provincial areas. This has caused newsrooms across the globe to work for their female employees, knowing that they run a higher risk.

These attacks are on multiple fronts from the government and personal cultural gangs and the impunity of these crimes committed against journalists poses serious threats to the integrity of journalism around the world. According to an academic journal by the UNESCO Chair in Media Freedom and head researchers The University of Sheffield, impunity is perpetrated by a lack of solidarity among journalists, a lack of protection from the government and media programs, an uninformed and uneducated public, and a lack of legal redress and standard. For example, 99.3 percent of crimes against journalists remain unsolved in Colombia. This creates a culture of impunity that instigates many crimes, allowing serious threats to go unacted upon. In the aforementioned academic journal about crimes committed by groups in Bajo Cauca, Colombia, it reads, “High levels of impunity for murdering journalists have been identified as one of the key factors, which fuel anti-press violence. Indeed these factors are key influences in the commander’s decision-making: ‘We always ask ourselves what will the law do. The protection of ourselves and our business is the most important.’” The lack of effective investigations and prosecutions of those responsible for crimes against journalists creates a state of impunity which will inevitably lead to further violence. 

A possible solution with an aim to inform the public is awareness amplification, which can be done through integration of education about journalist crimes into communication and media studies programs. According to an Assistant Professor at the School of International Communications at the University of Nottingham, there is a scarcity of instructional material in journalism curricula about how to report a conflict or crises, which creates ill-prepared journalists in the conflict area of Pakistan and allows for impunity to continue as the lay public and even people in the field are not informed on the issue. Additionally, social justice methods like protests and civil unrest can be effective to get global attention to the issue. A professor at the Institute for Further Education of Journalists found that social movements in Uganda have attracted a lot of attention and led to a level of reforms, but in the end these pursuits are much less successful than legal reforms and intervention. 

Therefore, the best solution is to bring judiciary resources and intervention to known zones of silence. Central to this issue are judiciary actors and the most direct way to end this issue is for official lawyers and representatives from supranational organizations to get involved. In UNESCO’s 2030-2035 Projection Plan, they have made it a priority to educate and employ specialists in the field of freedom of expression law to watchdog and represent journalists around the world. This is necessary because if individual cases garner attention and are brought to justice, the standard of impunity can increase. 

The forced exile of journalists leads to a lack of autonomy, which creates zones where impunity is used as a political tool by governments and state-sponsored actors to create journalistic self-censorship. An academic journal by the UNESCO Chair in Media Freedom and head researchers The University of Sheffield, points to the way that this greatly undermines the freedom and integrity of journalists. “Inevitably, self-censorship is on the rise within news organizations. 20 Accordingly, ‘journalists remain quite vulnerable as the government has yet to find workable mechanisms to ensure their safety in the country’. Attacks, violence against and attempted murders of journalists remain frequent with impunity being the norm for these actions against journalists.” Additionally, a PhD candidate in the Political Science Department of the University of Amsterdam conducted a study where he found that many Mexican journalists decided to reduce their risk by obstructing news or failing to report upon it if it could have a negative impact on their safety. This culture of self-censorship that is being fostered could be prevented if proper safety measures were in place. 

It is natural to adapt to the surrounding environment, making it clear why journalists work to self-censor. We can see this behavior even in animals. “Urban Evolution: How Species adapt to survive in cities” from Knowable Magazine demonstrates how, “Around the globe, living things are evolving differently in cities than the surrounding countryside” and gives examples of how climate change in cities causes animals to behave differently. Similarly, many actors against journalists are working to create journalistic self-censorship creating zones of silence. This term was coined by a professor in the Political Science Department of Linnaeus University and describes zones where only powerful people control the news you hear, zones which violate the freedom of expression, press, and our collective right as a society to access information. 

This effect is similar to that of the prison system voiced in Nelson Madela’s Long Walk to Freedom, where he explained how the prison system was meant to wear people down, so that they lost hope and gave into what the government wanted. “The challenge for every prisoner, particularly every political prisoner, is how to survive prison intact, how to emerge from prison undiminished, how to conserve and even replenish one’s beliefs.” In this light, we can see how many journalists are disincentivized and worn down by the constant threat.

Additionally, by increasing monitoring and instituting a system that lowers impunity rate, mental health and educational resources for journalists would improve. In a paper by an Associate Clinical Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, journalists have a higher risk of PTSD, similar to other first responders, and this trend is demonstrated in literature and studies over 20 years. “Journalists appear similar to coroners [4] and trauma surgeons [5] in their vulnerability to the onset of psychologi-cal trauma/PTSD, when responding to the same types of critical incidents to which first responders are summoned.” 

The questionable aspect of this solution is the variable in which journalists are being specifically targeted or in areas of general violence. According to an academic journal by a professor of Journalism at OsloMet looking in violence against journalists in Latin America, “The safety of indigenous journalists in Colombia is connected to the overall dynamics of violence, power struggles, conflict and war in Colombia. Colombia presents a number of contradictions.” In an article by PhD candidate in the Political Science Department of the University of Amsterdam dedicated to analyzing this topic, they found that the overall consensus was that while the official narrative in Mexico holds that journalists are the victims of general violence, journalists and NGOs contend that journalists are often targeted for political reasons. “Adjudicating between these two competing narratives is difficult, since criminal investigations into the murder of journalists generally fail to identify the perpetrators. The analysis in this article shows, however, that journalists are at a much higher risk of being killed than members of the general population. It also found that violence against journalists varies widely across Mexico’s states, suggesting a subnational element to the targeting of critical voices.” This contends that it may be difficult to find the root of the danger for journalists, and prove cases if violence in conflict zones.

With thousands killed in recent history and millions threatened in the field, it is evident that the current state of treatment for journalists in developing countries and conflict zones is unacceptable. The typology of impunity currently shows in a lack of protection from the government, continuous direct and indirect threats from government and state-sponsored actors and a feeling of fear, targeted attacks by non-parliamentary violent groups, lack of legal redress, and a lack of knowledge by the lay public which lead to the inevitability and inescapability of self-censorship, damaging the quality of journalism and greatly harming society. Under the laws of the Genova Convention, it is our duty as a society to protect all citizens, and for the integrity of journalism, we must uphold these principles for journalists in areas of conflict around the world.

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Works Cited 

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Charles, Matthew. “Why are journalists threatened and killed? A portrait of neo-paramilitary anti-press violence in Colombia’s Bajo Cauca.” vol. 23, no. 4, 9 June, 2023. Sage Journals, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1464884920928172. Accessed 18 March 2023. 

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