In a given year, we follow hundreds of journalists reporting from their countries, communities and traveling abroad to report the truth as foreign correspondents. We monitor their working conditions, the health of access they have, their ability to report the truth, and take note of any impediments that emerge. These impediments may include verbal and physical threats, including online smear campaigns, police violence, and legal harassment by corporations, governments, and powerful institutions.

The history of journalists facing threats for telling the truth is as old as journalism itself, but in a world disturbed by conflicts amidst widespread corruption, fading democracies, polarization, coup attempts, and governance either aligned with cartels or under the control of non-state actors, the threats journalists face today are multipronged and unprecedented. If you look at the world map today, from our newsroom, 80 percent of the globe is dangerous for journalists, particularly from gender and minority backgrounds. In the last four and a half years of monitoring press freedom violations against women and non-binary journalists at the CFWIJ, we have noted that at least 1 out of 5 women journalists are threatened for their jobs.

When I worked as a journalist for almost two decades, often covering terrorism and conflict in Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America, I often felt less on the radar as a woman. Particularly in more conservative countries, targeting women was against social norms, and in most parts of the world, women journalists were not taken seriously enough to be considered a threat. While verbal harassment and threats were not uncommon, physical assault, kidnapping, assassination attempts, and murders were very unlikely - all of which are the top violation trends we have reported at the CFWIJ Press Freedom Newsroom.

Something shifted in the last decade as press freedom has been declining, simultaneously with the rise of social media polarization that platformed the bombastic surge of political hate and misinformation. At the CFWIJ, we consistently noted a rise in attacks on women and non-binary journalists in the most crucial spots around the world. Our Press Freedom Newsroom, which monitors 128 countries, observes a simultaneity in global instability and rise of attacks on women and non-binary journalists - often, the latter remain confidential due to the very real danger LGBTQI+ journalists face all over the world with close to no protection.

Whether it is covid-19 related misinformation, elections in a country in Africa, cartels in Latin America, or indigenous issues in Canada, the last four years show a clear trend: big events mean more women journalists will be targeted, and their gender will often be utilized to abuse them more viciously. This year, it has been no different, but only more concerning as Russia has taken the front seat in targeting any form of speech, particularly in eastern and western Europe.

Concerningly, in the first half of 2023, we have documented the spike of a new trend: assassination attempts. As we monitored worldwide violations, we have recorded an increase in press freedom attacks in Europe. At this point, our team has documented a very similar nature of attacks around the world - police violence, legal harassment including SLAPPs, abductions, and assassination attempts - which means Western democracies, which for decades if not over a century, have been the safe haven for domestic and foreign journalism.

This year, we documented two murders and four assassination attempts. Victoria Amelina was fatally targeted with a deadly Russian missile in Ukraine, and Samaher Abdelshafi, who had first escaped Sudan due to her work and had been taking refuge in a camp in Darfur, was killed in a shelling.

Russian missiles have been found to be one of the most common sources of journalistic killing since the beginning of the war in Ukraine. Should we be suspicious of these patterns? Perhaps very much!

The assassination attempts were all very well planned, including attempts to fatally poison and blow up the cars of journalists. All of these assassination attempts are also graphics and put together in a way that if they were successful, it was impossible to miss the fact that these journalists were deliberately targeted. The message is dangerous. It is not ‘we will kill you,’ it is ‘we will come after you wherever you go.’

Read below in this report the assassination attempt of Natalia Amo, who is the third female journalist exiled and targeted by Russia in this way, all in European countries.

These trends should worry us all, particularly when Europe is one part of the world considered to be safe for exiled journalists from Russia and other parts of the world to live and work. Particularly when, for decades, press freedom attacks have been a business in the global south, where democracies have fallen, dictatorships have risen, or non-state actors have been in charge. Additionally, we have seen a rise in SLAPP cases, also in Europe, where we still await the clear punishment of the killers of our friend Daphne Caruana Galiza, who was killed 5 years ago for exposing corrupt politicians in Malta.

A truly urgent time for us to put on our re-thinking hats, come together in a room/zoom, and re-examine our process and planning around protecting journalists. Press freedom organizations, including the CFWIJ, individual advocates, defenders, and allies, are working harder than ever, but the threats have gotten more ubiquitous and serious. This lack of balance is unsustainable for our world. When violence gets close to journalists, it gets closer to civilians. In 2024, we are launching a new initiative called Women Press Freedom, which will focus solely on this issue that affects our world at large. In the last four years of CFWIJ’s Press Freedom Newsroom, which was merely a response initiative, has learnt some incredibly nuanced lessons about the role of gender in a world undergoing ideological and security turmoil. With the launch of our new initiative, Women Press Freedom, we are taking it to the next level.

Issues like misinformation, targeting of the media, and racial, political, and religious violence are merely tools and symptoms of something much greater happening to humanity. When women journalists are targeted around the world in raising numbers, and entire cultural shifts take place against women and minorities who speak, the issue does not affect the media alone. I hope we can all see that.

In our changing world, it is vital to project the role journalists from gender, race, and minority backgrounds play. That is what Women Press Freedom’s work is set to be, and we will appreciate it if you join us in this journey.

Kiran Nazish