China – Number of Jailed Female Journalists Surges Amid Global Increase in Arrests
Author: Administrator
Date: March 3, 2022
FILE – This screengrab taken on Dec. 28, 2020, from an undated video showing former Chinese lawyer and citizen journalist Zhang Zhan as she broadcasts via YouTube, at an unconfirmed location in China. (AFP / YouTube)
December 16, 2021 – In its summary of press violations in 2021, the media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) chronicled a 20% surge in the number of journalists arbitrarily detained. It is the highest figure since RSF began publishing its annual roundup in 1995.
Of the 488 detained, 60 were women — the highest number of female journalists to be jailed that RSF has ever documented. The data, which covers 2021 up to December 1, includes journalists and media workers.
Among those in custody are journalists who work for news networks under the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which also oversees VOA.
With more women working in media worldwide, the risk of arrest or attack has risen.
“Today, being a woman journalist does not protect you at all,” RSF’s editor-in-chief, Pauline Ades-Mevel, told VOA. “More female journalists have joined newsrooms in recent years. It’s a sort of democratization of the job that has put more female journalists behind bars.”
A surge in detentions in Belarus and Myanmar resulted in those countries being among the top five worst jailers.
China is the biggest jailer of journalists for the fifth straight year, according to RSF. It also holds the record for detaining the most female journalists, with 19 detained in China and Hong Kong.
Among those is Sophia Huang Xueqin, an investigative journalist known for her work in China’s #MeToo movement, who was arrested in September. She’s been placed in solitary confinement on suspicion of “inciting subversion of state power.”
Separately, Gulmira Imin is serving a lengthy sentence for charges including “separatism” and leaking state secrets. The journalist, who ran the Uyghur news site Salkin, has been in custody since 2009.
Others, like Zhang Zhan, who has been detained since May 2020 over her coverage of the start of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, have developed serious health problems.
Information obtained by RSF shows that Zhang is in critical condition after going on a hunger strike to protest a four-year prison sentence for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.”
The U.S. State Department has raised concerns over her deteriorating health and imprisonment.
Zhang was named RSF’s journalist of courage in November.
Direct Link to Full 10-Page IFJ Report: Fair_Game_-_IFJ_Report_2022.
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