An independent press that is free from government censorship is regarded as instrumental to ensuring human
rights protection. Yet governments across the globe often target journalists when their reports seem to offend them
or contradict their policies. Can the government’s infringements of the rights of journalists tell us anything about
its wider human rights agenda? The killing of a journalist is a sign of deteriorating respect for human rights. If a
government orders the killing of a journalist, it is willing to use extreme measures to eliminate the threat posed by
the uncontrolled flow of information. If non-state actors murder journalists, it reflects insecurity, which can lead to
a backlash by the government, again triggering state-sponsored repression. To test the argument whether the
killing of journalists is a precursor to increasing repression, we introduce a new global dataset on killings of
journalists between 2002 and 2013 that uses three different sources that track such events across the world. The
new data show that mostly local journalists are targeted and that in most cases the perpetrators remain unconfirmed.
Particularly in countries with limited repression, human rights conditions are likely to deteriorate in the
two years following the killing of a journalist. When journalists are killed, human rights conditions are unlikely to
improve where standard models of human rights would expect an improvement. Our research underlines the
importance of taking the treatment of journalists seriously, not only because failure to do so endangers their lives
and limits our understanding of events on the ground, but also because their physical safety is an important
precursor of more repression in the future.
