The New York Times: The Courage of Dieu Cay and Natalya Radzina

A leading American newspaper wrote about the journalists who are being persecuted for their work.

The Committee to Protect Journalists has named 12 countries — including Iraq, Russia, the Philippines, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Mexico — to its annual “impunity index” because they allow deadly violence against the press to go unpunished. The threats to journalists are also highlighted in a welcome, new State Department initiative. From now until World Press Freedom Day, May 3, the department’s HumanRights.gov Web site will tell the stories of people who have been killed, jailed or otherwise blocked from reporting the news and exercising the fundamental right to free speech.

The first case, posted Wednesday, involves Dieu Cay, a Vietnamese blogger who has been imprisoned since 2008 on the trumped-up charge of property tax evasion. His real “offense”: writing on sensitive human rights and corruption issues in Vietnam and criticizing China’s human rights record. On Thursday, it called attention to Natalya Radzina, a prominent democratic activist from Belarus, who was beaten and jailed by her government before going into political exile in Lithuania last year.

Many repressive governments predictably denounce the calls for free speech and a free press as an attempt to impose Western values. Yet the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, ratified by 167 countries, says that “everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers.”

The Obama administration is stressing another argument: self-interest. Countries that allow the free flow of information and debate, the exposing of corruption and other difficult issues, generally have more legitimate governments, more social resilience and stronger economies.

Unfortunately, most autocrats would rather stifle the truth than listen. The Committee to Protect Journalists said that since 1992, 639 reporters have been killed for doing their jobs, and, in 565 cases, the killers went unpunished. According to the group, around the globe political reporting is the most dangerous beat, and local journalists the mostly likely victims. It also found that violence against one journalist has grim, ripple effects, leading to vast self-censorship. When that happens, everyone in society pays a high price.

The New York Times