[imText1]Following last year North Korea was again considered the worst country in the world to violate freedom of speech. North Korea has maintained the lowest ranking for the fifth consecutive time on the press freedom index.
An international organization based in Paris, “Reports without Borders (RSF)”, announced on the 23rd the “Worldwide Press Freedom Index 2006” in which North Korea was ranked last on the index, at 168th, Myanmar was ranked 164th and China placed 163rd.
In the report, RSF said “Unfortunately nothing has changed in the countries that are the worst predators of press freedom,” and “Journalists in North Korea, Myanmar, and China are still risking their lives or facing imprisonment for trying to keep us informed.”
In particular, the RSF said, “The all-powerful North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il, also continues to totally control the media,” and advocated the urgency of the “leaders of these countries to accept criticism and stop routinely cracking down on the media so harshly.”
North Korea was ranked as the worst violator of speech as the RSF explained, “The Rodong Shinmun (The Worker’s Newspaper, the state controlled newspaper), the N. Korean Central News Agency, and the national television Joongang Bangsong, is under the direct control of Kim Jong Il,” and “Each journalist is indoctrinated so as to be able to render, without mistakes, the grandeur of the late president Kim Il Sung and of his son Kim Jong Il.”
The RSF said, “The press is also responsible for demonstrating the superiority of North Korean socialism over bourgeois and imperialist corruption,” and in actuality “Song Keum Chul, of state television was put in a concentration camp at the end of 1995, for having set up a small group of critical journalists.”
South Korea, first in the Asia region this year and last
Alternatively, South Korea elevated 3 places to 31st with the highest ranking in the Asia region. Since the RSF first announced the index in 2002, Korea was ranked 39th, 49th in 2003 , 48th in 2004 and in 2005 up 14 places to 34th.
With rising nationalism, Japan fell 14 places since last year to rank 51st on the freedom of press index and the U.S. also dropped to 53rd from 44th. The RSF explained in the U.S. case “relations between the media and the Bush administration sharply deteriorated” amongst the terror war and consequently fell from its ranking.
The RSF analyzes and ranks each country based on direct acts, inspection, investigations or pressures on journalist murders, arrests and incidents arising from freedom of press.
The RSF works in collaboration with 50 or so organizations, journalists, research institutes, legal experts, human rights movements worldwide, distributing surveys to each country and then collating the information to announce an annual ranking for press freedom.
