International Press Institute (IPI)

“We believe the repeated denigration of journalists, combined with the ruling party’s attempts to exert greater control over the country’s public service media, are creating an increasingly hostile climate for critical reporting which serves a fundamental role of holding the government to account.”

“The EU has sat on the sidelines for too long. Repeated inaction to stop the undermining of media freedom and pluralism first in Hungary, and then in Poland, has allowed this model of media capture to grow and spread to other Member States. The cost of further inaction is simply too high.”

Media increasingly becoming target of police violence and arrests; more than a dozen journalists were arrested during the most violent crackdown on protesters in Myanmar.

Report by Media Freedom Rapid Response (MFRR) members finds that “Poland is now taking worrying steps down the path established by Hungary, whose government has in the last decade created and then exported a system of media capture unprecedented in the EU”.

The International Press Institute expressed solidarity to members of the media in Myanmar and called on the military which staged a coup on 1 February to reverse course and return to democracy and fundamental rights.

This was the second time in recent months that a cyber libel charge was filed against Filipino-American journalist Maria Ressa, the founder of news portal ‘Rappler’.

“The monitoring of private communications and bank data from journalists is unprecedented and represents a gross violation of journalists’ rights to source confidentiality and professional secrecy, which are protected under both the Portuguese Constitution and international law”.

According to IPI’s COVID-19 Press Freedom Tracker, nearly 200 violations linked to the pandemic were reported from the Asia-Pacific region, of which 107 were from four South Asian countries: Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Nepal.