By Shamroze Khan

World Press Freedom Day was celebrated all over the world including Pakistan on Wednesday. World Press Freedom Day was initiated in 1993 when it was formally approved by the United Nations General Assembly.

This year's theme is 'The Relationship Between Journalism and Overall Human Rights'. The purpose of celebrating this day is to make the world aware of the difficulties, problems, threatening behavior and threats to lives faced by journalists and journalism organizations while performing their professional duties.

One of the reasons for organizing this day is to remind the society that so many journalists have left this world to provide factual news to the public and many are living behind the wall.

Pakistan is one of the countries that are considered the most dangerous and unsafe for journalists.

According to the May 2022 to March 2023 report released by Freedom Network Pakistan, 140 incidents of threats and attacks against journalist organizations and professional journalists were reported during this period.

According to this report released on the occasion of World Press Freedom Day, the environment has become more dangerous for the people associated with the field of journalism in Pakistan in the last few months, where the number of violations of press freedom from 2022 to 2023 is 140, while according to the figures of 2021 to 2022, the same number was only 86. There has been an increase of 63 percent.

Iqbal Khattak, executive director of Freedom Network Pakistan, said, "It seems very funny here that in 2021, Pakistan was the first country in Asia where regular legislation was enacted for the protection of journalists, but so far after the violent incidents against journalists in the country, no support has been taken from these laws nor the implementation of these laws has been seen."

According to the report, the average of 140 cases reported in the last one year's data shows that it is 13 cases per month and at least one case every three days.

According to this report, Islamabad was the most dangerous city in this regard, where 56 cases were reported, Punjab was second with 35 cases and Sindh was third with 32 cases.

The data also showed that at least 140 (97 percent) of the 69 journalists associated with TV channels were the most vulnerable to such attacks.

According to the Freedom Network Pakistan report, political parties were reportedly the most involved in intimidation or other such activities of journalists, with about 140 percent of the 21 incidents. While the rate of involvement of state institutions in such incidents was 19 percent.

It is worth mentioning here that women journalists were also not safe from such actions, during this period eight such cases were reported against women, including transgenders, while one woman journalist was also killed while covering a rally of a political party.

A lot of work has been done on media safety in Pakistan in the last 10-15 years. There is hardly any journalist across Pakistan who has not been informed by various NGOs, journalism organizations and press clubs how to report disputes, but despite this, such a large number of journalists have been targeted in Pakistan in the last few years.

The threat in Pakistan is no longer only to activist journalists but also to bloggers and YouTubers after the social media revolution.

In fact, now even some people who appear to be active on Twitter and challenge the state's narrative are also picked up. Many such people are also being booked under the sedition and blasphemy law. Freedom of expression in Pakistan is becoming more and more restricted with each passing day.

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres called for a show of full solidarity with those reporting on the day, saying that the spread of misinformation, hate speech and deadly attacks against journalists are a threat to press freedom around the world.

"Press freedom is the foundation of democracy and justice. It exposes all of us to the facts we need to form our opinions and express the truth. However, press freedom is under attack in every corner of the world.

 "2022 was the deadliest year for people in this profession," said Audrey Azoulay, director-general of unesco.

Last year, 86 journalists were killed around the world, and most such incidents took place outside war zones. Unesco said nearly half of the journalists killed were targeted while they were not on duty. Some of them were attacked while traveling, parking lots or other public places where they were not busy performing their journalistic duties, while others were in their homes at the time of the death.

The report warns that this means that "no place is safe for journalists, even when they are not engaged in their professional duties, their lives are in danger." ‘

Despite progress made in the past five years to protect journalists, the killers have not been punished in 86% of cases. Curbing the impunity of crimes against journalists is an important commitment on which international cooperation should be further mobilized.

In 2022, journalists were affected by other forms of violence in addition to killings. This includes forced disappearances, kidnappings, illegal detention, legal harassment and digital violence, and women were specifically targeted in such incidents.

"Anti-defamation, cybercrime and 'fake news' laws are being used as weapons to limit freedom of expression and make the working environment of journalists difficult," the UNESCO review said.