According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, in 2024 the main reasons for the imprisonment of journalists “were ongoing authoritarian repression (China, Myanmar, Vietnam, Belarus, Russia), war (Israel, Russia), and political or economic instability (Egypt, Nicaragua, Bangladesh)” (Maktoob Media, January 18, 2025).
A total of 54 [of the imprisoned journalists around the world counted in CPJ’s 2024 census] are serving more than 10 years; 55 between five and 10 years, and 62 between one and five years….
In China, it remains unclear whether five of the seven Uyghur students arrested with scholar and blogger Ilham Tohti were released when the last of them completed their sentences more than two years ago…
Almost half of those held in China are members of the mostly Muslim Uyghur minority; two are ethnic Kazakhs.
CPJ reports (January 16, 2025):
In China, a Beijing court issued Yang Hengjun a suspended death sentence in February 2024, which could be commuted to life imprisonment after a two-year period of good behavior. Yang, a former Chinese diplomat turned blogger and political commentator, frequently posted commentary on social media about U.S.-China relations, espionage, and political reform….
China has routinely appeared in CPJ’s annual prison census as one of the world’s top jailers of journalists. The 50 recorded as being behind bars on December 1, 2024, are likely an undercount given Beijing’s pervasive censorship and mass surveillance that often leaves families too intimidated to talk about a relative’s arrest….
In Hong Kong, the media faced growing pressure. Journalists detained in 2020 and 2021, as authorities’ cracked down on the city’s pro-democracy movement, remain in jail amid repeated legal delays….
In China’s northwestern region of Xinjiang, where Beijing has been accused of crimes against humanity for its mass detentions and harsh repression of Muslim groups, two Uyghur journalists, Qurban Mamut and Mirap Muhammad, appear for the first time in the 2024 census after CPJ research determined that their incarceration was linked to their work.
Mamut, the former editor-in-chief of the Uyghur-language magazine Xinjiang Civilization, is serving a 15-year sentence on charges of committing “political crimes” after he went missing in 2017…. Muhammad, a Uyghur blogger whose articles included sensitive topics such as Uyghur and human rights issues, has been held incommunicado since his arrest in 2018 on accusations of “illegally providing intelligence to a foreign body.”
CPJ says that over the last year, a record-setting year globally for jailing journalists, China has been increasing its targeting of these professionals. Of course, the 50 journalists “recorded as being behind bars” in 2024, plus some unknown additional number of journalists, are a small percentage of all those in China who are currently in prison as punishment for their words.
