Focus on the use of torture against journalist worldwide.

 

June 26th marks the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture. To call attention to the unrelenting use of torture to silence journalists around the world, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has highlighted emblematic cases and pays tribute to all the brave news professionals who have been subjected to this heinous crime simply for doing their job.


Over 40 years ago, the United Nations Convention against Torture, ratified by 175 states, formally prohibited “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person” for such purposes as obtaining a confession, punishment, intimidation, coercion or discrimination. This fundamental text obliges states to prevent, punish and eradicate torture. Yet in many countries, torture remains a means of repression used repeatedly against journalists. Behind the hollow commitments to the Convention, impunity reigns: torturers are known but never prosecuted, complaints are dismissed and investigations are often buried.


“Torture is absolutely prohibited under international law. No circumstances can justify it. Like the worst crimes against humanity, it aims to destroy, humiliate, and annihilate human beings by stripping them of all their dignity. In too many countries, journalists are targeted simply for doing their job. States that are signatories to the UN Convention against Torture continue to look the other way. Torturers are sometimes identified but are not prosecuted. The silence of these states amounts to complicity. RSF demands that commitments finally be honoured. The perpetrators of acts of torture must be prosecuted and the protection of journalists must be guaranteed.”
Antoine Bernard
RSF Director of Advocacy and Assistance


RSF has already filed several complaints with the International Criminal Court (ICC) to ensure that crimes committed against journalists do not go unpunished on a larger scale. These complaints target Russia, Belarus, and Israel, among other countries.

From Burma to Venezuela, from Egypt to the occupied territories of Ukraine, journalists around the world continue to be tortured for doing their job. This violence takes many forms, including kidnapping and arbitrary detention. Many have been tortured in secret locations, far from any legal protection or media coverage.

Abducted then tortured

The case of Émérite Amisi Musada, a journalist for the news website DeboutRDC who bravely reported on allegations of abuses committed by members of the national armed forces, is particularly striking. After receiving several threats, he was abducted on 15 April 2025, beaten and sexually assaulted for four days, and then abandoned in critical condition near Lake Kivu in Bukavu, the capital of South Kivu province in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

Venezuelan photojournalist Jesús Medina, who worked for the opposition newspaper Dólar Today, was found in November 2017, two days after his disappearance, on the side of a highway near the capital Caracas, half naked and with signs of violence on his body. A few days earlier, he had reported receiving death threats on social media for his coverage of the conditions in Tocorón prison.

Another chilling case is that of Radio France fixer and interpreter Nikita, whose first name has been changed to ensure his safety. Kidnapped by Russian troops on 5 March 2022, in a village in central Ukraine, he was detained for nine days, left in a freezing cold cellar, and tortured repeatedly. For 48 hours, he was abused with knives and electricity, repeatedly beaten with the butts of machine guns on his face and body, and subjected to a mock execution.

Tortured in detention

In prison, journalists are far from the public eye, and often subjected to physical violence, sexual abuse and prolonged psychological pressure.Physical violence:

Accused of espionage, Ukrainian journalist Vladyslav Yesypenko was arrested in March 2021 in Crimea, a territory occupied by Russia. At the time, he was a correspondent for Krym.realii, a local branch of the US media outlet Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL). Held incommunicado, he was given electric shocks for two days to force him to make a “confession” that was broadcast on a Russian TV channel. Sentenced to six years in prison in February 2022 for “possession and transport of explosives” – a sentence commuted to five years a few months later – he was released on 20 June 2025.

Alena Dubovik (Scharbinskaya), a journalist with the exiled Belarusian channel Belsat TV, was beaten with batons and humiliated, including being forced to remain half-naked, while detained in August 2020. Imprisoned with around 50 other female detainees in a 12 m² cell designed for four, she was also deprived of food for 24 hours and had to be hospitalised immediately after her release from police custody.

In Gaza, Palestinian journalist Diaa al-Kahlout, head of the Al-Araby al-Jadded media office, was abducted from his home in Beit Lahia in December 2023 and held for more than a month in a camp at the Israeli military base in Sde Teiman. Starved, humiliated, and beaten during his detention, the journalist reported to RSF the various forms of torture he was subjected to before and after each of his three interrogations. In particular, he was tied by his wrists behind his back, his feet barely touching the ground for hours — a form of torture known as shabeh (“ghost” in Arabic). He also described being deprived of food, clean clothes, and access to a shower.

In China, dozens of journalists have been subjected to “residential surveillance at a designated location,” a euphemism for an official system of incommunicado detention in the regime's “black jails,” where torture is widely practised. Chinese-born Australian political columnist Yang Hengjun reported being subjected to over 300 interrogations, often in the middle of the night, handcuffed at the wrists and ankles, and sometimes blindfolded. This was done to extract a “confession” from him. Like other media professionals currently imprisoned in China — including renowned independent journalist Sophia Huang Xueqin — he was also subjected to the “tiger chair,” a device notoriously used by the Chinese police that completely immobilises the body, causing unbearable pain, sometimes for several days.Deprivation of medical care:

Detained journalists in China are almost systematically denied access to medical care. In 2017, Liu Xiaobo, winner of the RSF Prize and the Nobel Peace Prize died of untreated cancer while in detention. The Chinese regime categorically refused to allow him to seek treatment abroad after he was diagnosed with terminal cancer.

The systematic denial of medical care also occurs in Vietnam. Journalist Le Huu Minh Tuan, who has been detained since 2020, has long suffered from digestive problems, colitis, and hepatitis, but prison authorities continue denying him access to the medication his family sends, even though it has been prescribed by doctors. In June 2025, his relatives warned that his health had seriously deteriorated, marked by persistent intestinal bleeding.Sexual violence:

In Iran, many women journalists have been arbitrarily imprisoned in Evin prison and Garchak prison for covering the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protest movement, which was triggered by the death of Kurdish student Mahsa Amini in 2022 who died while being detained for wearing her headscarf incorrectly. In addition to the catastrophic conditions of imprisonment, several journalists have reported harassment and sexual violence, including 2023 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi, who was jailed in Evin prison between November 2021 and November 2024.Psychological violence:

Imprisoned for five years, Ihar Losik, blogger and consultant for Radio Svaboda, the Belarusian service of the Prague-based US broadcaster Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), was sentenced to 15 years in prison in Belarus after 18 months in pretrial detention. He was subjected to severe physical and psychological pressure, which lead him to go on two hunger strikes, one lasting six weeks, and attempt suicide. Prison authorities have sought to undermine his mental state by regularly changing his cell, preventing him from receiving mail for long periods of time, and denying him visits from his family, including his daughter, who was born at the beginning of his detention. His wife has also been sentenced to two years in prison for giving an interview about her husband to the independent channel Belsat TV.

Kyrgyz journalist Makhabat Tazhibek Kyzy was beaten by prison officers three months after her arrest in January 2024, according to her husband Bolot Temirov, an investigative journalist expelled from Kyrgyzstan. The prison administration claimed that she had inflicted the injuries on herself. Sentenced to six years in prison in October 2024, she faces intimidation and threats. Her health has deteriorated since then. To put pressure on her, their young child was placed in the care of social services before the grandparents were able to obtain custody.

Mohamed Oxygen, founder of the Egyptian news blog Oxygen Misr, was first arrested in 2018 and released in 2019, with the obligation to report twice a week to the police station to account for all his activities. In September, he was returned to prison for a year of arbitrary detention. In September 2021, he attempted to take his own life before being sentenced to four years in prison in December. Since 2023, the year he received RSF’s Courage Award, he has been held in solitary confinement in a 1.5 m2 cell infested with vermin.

Journalists beaten to death

In some cases, the torture inflicted on journalists leaves them no chance of survival, as in Syria, where many of the 181 media professionals killed by Bashar al-Assad’s regime and its supporters between 2011 and 2024 died in prison as a result of torture. The bodies found, when they are found, bear the marks of unspeakable brutality. Too often, investigations into these deaths remain incomplete, obstructed or stifled, leaving families without truth or justice.

In Ukraine, an investigation by RSF and the Ukrainian investigative media outlet Slidstvo.info retraced the last months of Ukrainian journalist Victoria Roshchyna, who died after more than 13 months in Kremlin prisons. Arrested in August 2023 in the occupied south-east of Ukraine, she ws eventually transferred to Prison No. 2 in the city of Taganrog, which has been turned into a torture camp for Ukrainian civilians. Witnesses who saw her reported that her body bore visible signs of abuse, including cuts and scars, and that by the summer of 2024, she weighed only about 30 kilograms. Her body was returned to Ukraine in February 2025, with several organs amputated. The cause of her death remains unknown. At least 28 Ukrainian media professionals are still jailed in Russia, subjected to physical and psychological violence.

In February 2023, a few months before Victoria Roshchyna was arrested, Burmese freelance journalist Myat Thu Tun was found dead in the Rakhine region in the west of the country. Buried in an air-raid shelter, his body was riddled with bullets and showed signs of torture. He had been reported missing after being detained by the military junta.

One unresolved case dates back to nearly a decade. In 2016, Malian journalist Birama Touré, former reporter for the investigative media outlet Le Sphinx, was abducted, kidnapped, and tortured by the Malian intelligence services, according to testimonies gathered by RSF. Our investigation has led us to believe that this journalist is dead, most likely as a result of the abuse he suffered, some of which was sexual in nature. His body has still not been found.

Journalists that do not die from torture often suffer long-term health consequences. For example, Turkmen journalist Khudayberdy Allashov, a former correspondent for RFE/RL’s Turkmen service, Radio Azatlyk, died on 13 August 2024, after eight years of persecution by the authorities. He had developed serious health problems after his first detention in 2016, which was marked by torture, including electric shocks and beatings that permanently damaged his kidneys. Even after his release, he was unable to seek medical treatment because local health facilities refused to treat him due to his past detention, and he was banned from leaving his city.