Reporters Without Borders

Media freedom in Turkey, Bulgaria and Montenegro is the worst in the region, according to the 2020 World Press Freedom Index, published on Tuesday by Reporters Without Borders - but other Balkan countries have largely failed to improve.

"In southern Europe, a crusade by the authorities against the media is very active," the report warns.

A Pakistani journalist living in exile in Sweden has been missing for nearly a month, stoking fears that his disappearance is tied to his reporting on Balochistan, a press rights group said on March 31.    

Sajid Hussain went missing on March 2, according to police.    

The international journalistic organisation Reporters without Borders ranked Serbia in 90th place in 2019 in terms of freedom of the media, 14 places lower than in 2018. According to the EU statistics agency Eurostat, about 51,000 mostly young and educated people leave Serbia every year.

International media watchdog Reporters Without Borders, RSF, has called on the Serbian authorities to investigate how much surveillance goes on in the country - after the Serbian news agency Tanjug on February 16 published a response written by the Defence Minister to a never-published opinion piece by a former defence minister.

Since then, however, the fight to defend journalistic freedom has flagged, and public mobilisation has proved to be fleeting — including in the case of Charlie Hebdo.

In January 2019, the magazine's staff complained in an editorial that people no longer wanted to hear about the shootings. "Perhaps you should move on!" they were reportedly told.

All three arrests happened at a time of high tension in Montenegro. All over the country, tens of thousands of people are protesting against the new Law on Freedom of Religion, which parliament passed in the last days of 2019, despite being challenged by most of the opposition and by the Serbian Orthodox Church, the main faith group in the country.

The latest annual report by Reporters without Borders, RSF, on journalists that were killed, detained and held hostage throughout the world, says Turkey still has one of the worst records on jailing journalists, even though the number is lower now than in other years.

Journalists' deaths are at "historically low levels" globally, according to a report by Reporters Without Borders, quoted by AFP.

Most journalists killed in 2019 covered military conflicts in Yemen, Syria and Afghanistan, say the Paris-based organization and recall that journalism remains a dangerous profession.

Two Indonesian journalists who mediated a land dispute between a palm oil company and residents were found dead with multiple stab wounds near a Sumatra plantation, police said.

At the meeting they held at 2 Dondukov street, Head of State Rumen Radev and Christophe Deloire, Secretary General of "Reporters Without Borders" discussed the state of the media environment in Bulgaria, the public trust in the media, the professional standards in journalism, the models of funding the Bulgarian media and the approaches to defending the independence of the editorial policy.