The Committee to Protect Journalists

About Prison Census 2022:

• This figure is a new global high that overtakes last year’s record by 20%.
• New ‘fake news’ laws, criminal defamation, and abuse of judiciary are also tactics used to clamp down on press freedom.
• This year’s top five jailers of journalists were Iran, China, Myanmar, Turkey, and Belarus, respectively.
• The report stated that a key driver behind authoritarian governments’ increasingly oppressive efforts to stifle the media was the intent “to keep the lid on broiling discontent in a world disrupted by COVID-19 and the economic fallout from Russia’s war on Ukraine”.
• India draw criticism over its use of the Jammu and Kashmir Public Safety Act, a preventive detention law, to keep few Kashmiri journalists behind bars after they were granted court-ordered bail in separate cases”.

Repression of Minorities:

• The report noted that in Iran and Turkey – both classified as “worst offenders” – it was Kurdish journalists who bore the brunt of government crackdown.
• In China, too, another ‘worst offender’, many imprisoned journalists were Uighurs from Xinjiang.

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The Committee to Protect Journalists:

• The Committee to Protect Journalists is an independent, nonprofit organization that promotes press freedom worldwide.
• Its headquarters in New York City.

Q1) What is the Public Safety Act?

The Public Safety Act (PSA), 1978, of Jammu & Kashmir is an administrative detention law that allows arrest & detention of any individual without a warrant or specific charges for up to two years without a trial or charge. The Act was first promulgated in 1978 during the chief ministerial tenure of Sheikh Abdullah.

Source: The Hindu