A collective forum of editors and news directors has launched a website to record what they declared as a government crackdown against the media.
The team of Editors for Safety (EFS) in collaboration with the Pakistan Press Foundation (PPF) launched Monday the Pakistan Journalists Memorial website on the eve of the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists, which is marked on November 2, at the Karachi Press Club.
EFS is a collective forum of editors and news directors representing a large number of newspapers, television channels and online news portals that focuses exclusively on issues related to violence and threats of violence against the media in Pakistan.
The online archive will provide a permanent, updated record of cases that “capture the atrocities” with which perpetrators of such violence operate.
Jahanzaib Haque, who designed the portal said it was not the first memorial created by his team.
“The first one like it was about the Army Public School attack victims, information for which was not easy to gather because it was so painful. The next one was about the Quetta attack on lawyers in which we also lost journalists. Here, the PFF did most of the work, which was also not easy as it required sensitivity,” a news report quoted Haque as saying.
“I don’t usually do the writing and edits for our website but for this particular site, I personally sat down to do all that. The data, the stories of each fallen journalist is horrifying, it affects you,” he said.
According to journalist Ghazala Fasih, the figures shared by PPF suggest 76 journalists have been murdered since 2002.
A report of the Freedom Network launched on the eve of the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists, said that nearly two dozen journalists in Pakistan were charged in the last two years and most of them were prosecuted under the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act (PECA), introduced in 2016 ostensibly to combat cybercrime.
Zaffar Abbas, Dawn editor and EFS founding chairperson, said the body was not a trade union or NGO. They only stood for the journalists’ community.
“There is the Council of Pakistan Newspaper Editors, the All Pakistan Newspapers Society, the Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists. All do their work. But our only goal is to protect journalists,” he said.
