{"id":19521,"date":"2023-03-09T17:08:56","date_gmt":"2023-03-09T17:08:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pakistanintheworld.pk\/live\/?p=19521"},"modified":"2023-03-09T17:08:56","modified_gmt":"2023-03-09T17:08:56","slug":"73-women-journalists-spend-8-march-behind-bars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pakistanintheworld.pk\/live\/73-women-journalists-spend-8-march-behind-bars\/","title":{"rendered":"73 Women Journalists spend 8 March Behind Bars"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"\"Islamabad: On International Women’s Day, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) calls for the immediate and unconditional release of imprisoned women journalists throughout the world, and sounds the alarm about the disappearance of women journalists from the Afghan media landscape.<\/strong><\/h5>\n
Of the 550 journalists and media workers who are currently imprisoned worldwide, 73 \u2013 more than 13% \u2013 are women, according to RSF\u2019s\u00a0press freedom barometer<\/a>, a proportion that has doubled in the past five years. More women are reporting in the field, they are more visible in newsrooms, and they are also more likely to fall victim to relentless persecution in 14 countries around the world, especially China (with 21 women journalists in prison), Iran (12), Belarus (10), Vietnam (4) and Turkey (4).<\/h5>\n

Front line<\/strong><\/p>\n

Women journalists have paid the price for being at the front line in recent crises. Of the 12 women journalists currently detained in Iran, 11 were arrested\u00a0in the wake of the protests<\/a>\u00a0about Kurdish student Mahsa Amini\u2019s death in police custody. Two of the women journalists who did most to draw the public\u2019s attention to her case \u2013\u00a0Nilufar Hamedi<\/a><\/strong>, by going to the hospital where she was in a coma, and\u00a0Elahe Mohammadi<\/a>,<\/strong> by covering her funeral \u2013 are accused of \u201cpropaganda against the system\u201d and \u201cconspiring to act against national security \u2013 charges that could carry the death penalty.<\/p>\n

In Myanmar,\u00a0Htet Htet Khine<\/a><\/strong>, a woman freelancer held in Yangon\u2019s notorious Insein prison since August 2021, has been sentenced twice to three years of imprisonment with hard labour on charges of \u201cinciting hatred and violence against the armed forces\u201d for reporting the violence they used after taking power in a coup in February 2021.<\/p>\n

In Belarus \u2013 which sadly stood out in RSF\u2019s\u00a02021 Round-up<\/a>\u00a0as the country that was holding more women journalists (17) than men (15) \u2013 nine are still being held for covering unauthorised protests. And they are being spared nothing, neither long sentences nor denial of medical care.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Katsiaryna Bakhvalava<\/strong> (aka\u00a0Katsiaryna Andreyeva<\/a><\/strong>)\u00a0was sentenced to a total of ten years and three months in prison for filming an anti-Lukashenko protest on Minsk\u2019s \u201cSquare of Changes\u201d in November 2020. She has begun to lose her sight but nothing is being done to remedy it. Her colleague\u00a0Ksenia Lutskina<\/a><\/strong>, who is serving an eight-year sentence, has asthma problems and a brain tumour that are not being treated.<\/h5>\n

Slow death, mistreated, denied care<\/strong><\/p>\n

In Vietnam,\u00a0Pham Doan Trung<\/a><\/strong>, who was awarded\u00a0RSF\u2019s Prize for Impact<\/a>\u00a0in 2019, has been moved to a prison 1,000 km south of Hanoi in an attempt to suppress any reporting about her state of health, which is critical. Women detainees in China are subjected to similarly appalling conditions that include denial of medical attention and mistreatment.\u00a0Huang Xueqin (Sophia Huang)<\/a><\/strong>, a journalist famous for her involvement in the #MeToo movement in China, suffers from stabbing pains in her waist after being mistreated and even tortured.<\/p>\n

From their cells, some women journalists manage to report what they and their fellow detainees are having to endure. \u201cIn recent days, a number of inmates [\u2026] have given shocking accounts of how they were assaulted,\u201d Iran’s\u00a0Narges Mohammadi<\/strong>, a\u00a02022 RSF Press Freedom laureate<\/a>, wrote in an\u00a0open letter<\/a>\u00a0published on 24 December 2022. A month before that, in a book entitled\u00a0White Torture, she described another form of torture practiced in prisons, involving sensory deprivation during prolonged, total solitary confinement with no access to natural light.<\/p>\n

Erasing women journalists from Afghanistan<\/strong><\/h5>\n
The media landscape in Afghanistan has changed beyond recognition in less than two years. Half of the 526 media outlets that existed until the summer of 2021 have had to close and, of the 2,300 women journalists registered prior to 15 August 2021 (the date of the Taliban takeover), fewer than 200 are still working. Almost all of the women journalists (90%) have had to leave their jobs and some have fled the country, although exactly how many have managed to flee is not known.<\/em><\/h5>\n

Those still working must accept conditions that are becoming more and more draconian if not impossible. The Taliban recently banned women journalists from interviewing men and from attending press conferences in some provinces. Similarly, they are banned from hosting radio or TV shows together with male colleagues, or from receiving male guests.<\/p>\n

The Taliban Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Repression of Vice has also imposed a strict dress code. When women journalists are on camera, they must be covered from head to toe and only their eyes may be seen.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Islamabad: On International Women’s Day, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) calls for the immediate and unconditional release of imprisoned women journalists throughout the world, and sounds the alarm about the disappearance of women journalists from the Afghan media landscape. Of the 550 journalists and media workers who are currently imprisoned worldwide, 73 \u2013 more than 13% […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19522,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[83,84],"tags":[1668,3337,355,3339,3340,3336,552,3341,3338,3342,3343,129,43],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pakistanintheworld.pk\/live\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19521"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pakistanintheworld.pk\/live\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pakistanintheworld.pk\/live\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pakistanintheworld.pk\/live\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pakistanintheworld.pk\/live\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19521"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/pakistanintheworld.pk\/live\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19521\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19524,"href":"https:\/\/pakistanintheworld.pk\/live\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19521\/revisions\/19524"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pakistanintheworld.pk\/live\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19522"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pakistanintheworld.pk\/live\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pakistanintheworld.pk\/live\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pakistanintheworld.pk\/live\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}