Sri Lanka improves ranking in CPJ’s Global Impunity Index

Sri Lanka has been ranked as the sixth worst place for journalists worldwide in the 2015 Global Impunity Index published by the New York based-Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).

Sri Lanka moved to sixth place from fourth on this year’s Global Impunity Index, which is published annually, identifies countries where journalists are murdered regularly and governments fail to solve the crimes.

The CPJ in its report said the improvement in Sri Lanka is not due to prosecutions as the island nation “still maintains a perfect record of impunity in journalist slayings”, but to the fact that no journalists have been murdered for their work since the end of civil war in 2009.

Sri Lanka received an Impunity Index Rating of 0.242 which represents unsolved journalist murders per million inhabitants. Last year’s index rating was 0.443.

“So far, President Maithripala Sirisena, inaugurated in January this year, has demonstrated greater political will for justice than his predecessor, Mahinda Rajapaksa, under whose leadership nine media murders, including the five from this index period, took place,” CPJ said.

In May, President Sirisena pledged to reopen the investigations into journalists killed or disappeared during the last 30 years, naming the assassination of prominent editor Lasantha Wickremetunga and the disappearance of cartoonist Prageeth Ekneligoda as priority cases.

Since then, at least seven Army officers have been arrested in connection with Ekneligoda’s case while Wickremetunga’s and all other killings remain unsolved.

For this edition, CPJ examined journalist murders in every nation in the world that took place between 1 September 2005, and 31 August 2015. Only those nations with five or more unsolved cases are included on the index.

In the impunity index released Thursday, CPJ said 14 countries met the index criteria.

Somalia topped the list of countries where journalists’ murders are most likely to go unpunished, while Iraq, Syria, the Philippines and South Sudan were the worst five offenders in that order.

Behind South Sudan are Sri Lanka (6), Afghanistan (7), Mexico (8), Pakistan (9), Russia (10), Brazil (11), Bangladesh (12), Nigeria (13) and India (14).