Earlier this month, Omar Shakir stepped down from a senior role at Human Rights Watch after the group’s suppression of a report describing Israel’s denial of Palestinian refugees’ right of return as a “crime against humanity.”
“I have lost my faith in the integrity of how we do our work and our commitment to principled reporting on the facts and application of the law,” wrote Shakir in his resignation letter – after serving as Israel/Palestine director at Human Rights Watch for a decade.
Now, whistleblowers say a similar pattern has unfolded at the Committee to Protect Journalists.
The current and former staffers, writing to The Electronic Intifada as a group, say that their organization’s CEO Jodie Ginsberg “did the exact same thing last August, albeit in a smarter, more concealed way to manage the anger of staff.”
According to the whistleblowers, Ginsberg “decided to cancel [CPJ’s] Impunity Index simply because the math showed Israel is number one.”
Published since 2008, the annual report is designed to highlight countries that allow those who deliberately target journalists to get away with their crimes. The ranking measures the number of unsolved journalist murders as a percentage of each country’s population, covering a rolling 10-year period.
“It’s a very concrete measure of accountability,” according to the whistleblowers. “The data in it is deeply trusted and cited by the UN Human Rights Office and UNESCO.”
The ranking is regularly referenced in UN reports.
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