Worldwide Round-up of journalists who are detained, held hostage or missing 2016

At the end of 2016, RWB counted 56 journalists held hostage with the highest concentration being in Syria (26) Yemen (16) and Iraq (10). As registered in the report, the main abductors of journalists are ISIS in the Middle East and Houthis Shia rebels in Yemen.

Overall, the report records 348 journalists detained across the world, a number much higher than the one detected by the other organization conducting a similar monitoring activity, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). The reason for this lies in a different methodology adopted by RSF: for the first time this year, RSF monitoring included not only professional journalists but also citizen journalists and media contributors in its annual round-up, in the light of the consideration of their growing role in the production of news and information.

The proportion of detained journalists who are women has more than doubled in 2016, reflecting in part the growing role of women in journalism but above all the disastrous situation in Turkey, which currently accounts for a third of the world’s detained women journalists.

The countries representing biggest prisons for journalist at the end of 2016 are Turkey (around 100 detained journalists), China (103), Syria (28), Egypt (27) and Iran (24).