#FightImpunity

Borja Lázaro went missing on 8 January 2014 in Cabo de Vela, a village in Colombia’s northeastern department of La Guajira, where he had been doing a series of photo-reportages on indigenous cultures. As he disappeared in a drug-trafficking region dominated by “Bacrim,” criminal gangs that have their origins in the paramilitary movement, he may well have been kidnapped. Read more

A Zamora-based correspondent for the newspaper Cambio in Michoacán state, Mexican journalist María Esther Aguilar Casimbe disappeared aged 33 on 11 November 2009. A crime reporter, she left her home after receiving a mysterious phone call and has not been seen since. Read more

Iranian newspaper editor Pirouz Davani has not been seen since 25 August 1998. As the Iranian authorities never showed any interest in solving his disappearance, the Davani family filed a complaint with the UN Human Rights Committee in December 2002. He went missing during a dark episode in Iran’s recent history, when many intellectuals and government opponents were murdered. Read more

A correspondent for France 24 and Radio Monte Carlo Doualiya, young Bahraini journalist Nazeeha Saeed was beaten, tortured and humiliated by police for covering the March 2011 pro-democracy protests. She filed a complaint against five police officers but only one was put on trial and he was finally acquitted in October 2012. Read more

A Pakistani journalist who had been investigating links between the Pakistani army and Al-Qaeda, Syed Saleem Shahzad went missing in Islamabad on 29 May 2011 and was found dead two days later. Many human rights NGOs blamed the Pakistani intelligence services for his death but a specially created judicial commission said it was impossible to prove this. Read more

A poet and journalist with Swedish and Eritrean dual nationality and founder of the pro-reform newspaper Sewit, Dawit Isaak has been cut off from the world and his family for 13 years, held incommunicado in Eritrean President Issayas Aferworki’s horrifying prison camps. He is just the most visible face of the unrelenting impunity in Eritrea, Africa’s biggest prison for journalists. Read more

Novoye Delo editor and correspondent of the Kavkazskiy Uzel news website Akhmednabi Akhmednabiyev was gunned down as he was leaving his home in Dagestan’s capital, Makhachkala, on 9 July 2013. Known for covering human rights violations, he had received many threats and his name was on a hit-list of people to be killed for supposedly colluding with armed Islamists. Read more

Sofiane Chourabi and Nadhir Ktari, two Tunisian journalists working for Tunisia’s First TV, disappeared in Libya on 7 September 2014. More than a year has gone by but no information has emerged about the reasons for their disappearance. In January 2015, they were reported to have been killed but, on 7 September 2015, Tunisia’s foreign minister said they were still alive. Their families are not, however, convinced. Read more

A secularist writer, blogger and founder of the Mukto-Mona (Free Thought) website, Avijit Roy was slain by men with machetes as he and his wife were leaving a book fair near the University of Dhaka on 26 February 2015. Read more

Ghislaine Dupont and Claude Verlon had just interviewed one of the leaders of the Azawad National Liberation Movement (MNLA) in Kidal, in northern Mali, on 2 November 2013 when they were kidnapped by four gunmen and were taken away in a pickup. An hour later, their bullet-riddled bodies were found near the abandoned pickup in the desert east of the town. Read more

An intellectual with dual French and Lebanese nationality, columnist for the daily An-Nahar and outspoken critic of the Lebanese police state and Syrian meddling in Lebanon, Samir Kassir was killed by a bomb planted in his car outside his Beirut home on 2 June 2005. His still unsolved murder was one of the first of a long series of shootings and bombings targeting influential journalists and politicians. Read more

A young correspondent for the pro-Kurdish newspaper Özgür Gündem in the southeastern city of Urfa, Nazım Babaoğlu disappeared without a trace on 12 March 1994 after volunteering to go to the small town of Siverek in response to a mysterious call to the newspaper. He never came back. No credible investigation has ever been conducted in the 21 years since his disappearance. Read more

Sri Lankan political analyst and cartoonist Prageeth Eknaligoda disappeared after leaving his office on 24 January 2010, nearly five years ago. He had told a friend a few days before he went missing that he thought he was being followed. The police never found out what happened to him and some government officials even went too far as to suggest that he staged his own disappearance. Read more

French journalist Guy-André Kieffer was probing questionable practices in Côte d’Ivoire’s cocoa trade when he was snatched from an Abidjan supermarket parking lot on 16 April 2004. The Ivorian and French authorities kept promising to solve his disappearance, but those suspected of involvement – all linked to then President Laurent Gbagbo – have continued to observe a pact of silence. Read more