The list of “predators of the free press” for 2021 was published on Monday (5/7) by the non-governmental organization Reporters Without Borders (RSF).
The list includes for the first time the leader of an EU member state, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, among 37 heads of state or government.
The members of this list, which was most recently renewed in 2016, “impose a mass repression, through the application of censorship mechanisms, arbitrary imprisonment of journalists, incitement to violence against them, when they have not directly or indirectly pushed them to murder.” , the NGO states in its announcement.
Who are the “tyrants” for the media?
Nearly half (17 of them) are “in it for the first time” next to “old tyrants” who had already been described as “predators” by the RSF in 2001, including Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the top Iranian leader Ali Khamenei, Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Belarusian counterpart Alexander Lukashenko, as well as Ecuadorian President Teodoro Obyang Ngema Basogo, Eritrean Isaiah Afeouki Eritrea.
In addition to Victor Orban, who according to the NGO “has not stopped effectively attacking media pluralism and independence since returning to power in 2010”, among those newly added to the list are the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. Mohammed bin Salman, who has proceeded to a “multifaceted” and “barbaric repression”, which is shown by the “terrible murder, in 2018, of the columnist Jamal Kasogi».
The list, as broadcast by the Athens News Agency, includes the President of Brazil Zaich Bolsonaru “Whose belligerent and rotten rhetoric for the press has multiplied since the outbreak of the health crisis.”
Two women are also on the list
The list now includes two women, one of whom is the head of the Hong Kong government, Kari Lam. “Puppet in the hands of Chinese President Xi Jinping, she openly supports his policies of restraint, which are due to the disappearance in June of Hong Kong’s main independent newspaper Apple Daily and the imprisonment of its founder Jimmy Lai,” RS notes.
The other woman on the list is Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who “mainly led to the adoption of the Digital Security Act in 2018, which has led to prosecutions of more than 70 journalists and bloggers.”
“The average age of predators is 66, while the Asia-Pacific region alone has 13 of the 37 tyrants recorded,” the NGO said.
RSF had published in 2020 a list of “digital predators of the free press” and will publish one of the “non-state predators” before the end of the year.
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