I’m always wary of referring to the west as “the free world”, and of proclaiming that we are therefore blessed with “press freedom” because, in both cases, that freedom is relative and often under pressure.

However, when I see what passes for freedom in many other countries, when I see what happens to journalists who must risk their lives to carry out their tasks, I cannot but argue that matters are considerably better here.

Over the past 10 years on this blog (which concludes today), I have been observing and recording the deaths of journalists across the world in places where there is very little freedom indeed.

I have been able to do this because of organisations that report on, and campaign on behalf of, journalists who are prevented from doing their job, journalists who are imprisoned for doing their job, journalists who are abducted for doing their job and journalists who end up in cemeteries simply because they dared to do their job.

Those organisations include the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders (RSF), and I am proud to have joined the board of its new UK arm.

I must mention two other bodies as well: the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists and the Vienna-based International Press Institute.

Groups such as the International News Safety Institute (INSI), Index on Censorship and Reprieve have done sterling work too. And there has also been tireless publicity work by various journalism unions, many of whose leaders and members have exhibited considerable courage to stand up for their colleagues.

But there is much work still to be done. Journalists are being killed, being imprisoned, being intimidated and suffering from censorship on a daily basis. The figures tell only part of the story: 59 journalists killed in 2016; one already this year; and 177 journalists in prison as I write.

Turkey currently holds the dubious title of the greatest jailer of journalists, with 37 in prison. Egypt has 27; Iran, 12; Eritrea 11; Uzbekistan, 10. In the small oil-rich state of Bahrain, recently visited by Prince Charles “at the request of Her Majesty’s government”, there are eight journalists behind bars.

Bahraini journalist Nazeeha Saeed, about whom I’ve written several times, is undergoing trial at present for “unlicensed journalism.” In May 2011, she was tortured by the police for reporting on the events of the Arab Spring.

It may not surprise you to learn that Bahrain’s authorities decided not to prosecute her torturers. A week or so ago, those authorities suspended the online platform of a leading newspaper, Al-Wasat, for supposedly “inciting a spirit of division and harming national unity.”

Here, we may rail against the Daily Mail for attacking judges, indeed we may rail against it for all manner of things, but we would not condone it being banned. That’s what I mean by us being freer in Britain.

I’m sad to say we are also freer to ignore what’s happening elsewhere. When there is a mass slaughter of journalists, such as the cartoonists of the Parisian magazine Charlie Hebdo, the story is covered well.

That attack on freedom of expression was but one of scores of examples that are never reported at all. When British journalists are killed or badly wounded while reporting from conflict zones, there is appropriate coverage.

But the bravery of reporters trying to tell stories within their own countries are rarely given anything like as much attention.

I’m talking about people like Nazeeha Saeed in Bahrain, about journalists in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, where politicians conspire in murder, detention and intimidation. And then there is Russia, where investigative journalists Anna Politkovskaya and Anastasia Baburova were murdered.

I’m also talking about scores of journalists in Mexico and other South American countries, where the authorities turn a blind eye when drug cartels murder reporters and editors, sometimes because those journalists are trying to reveal the covert relationship between politicians and drug gangs.

The killing of individual journalists, the jailing of journalists by dictatorial regimes, these tend to get little, if any, coverage at all. The BBC’s online service is arguably best at recording such deaths, but despite declining circulations, power still lies with the national press in Britain.

I long ago accepted that all news is local. We worry about what’s closest to us. We worry over our own. But what should distinguish journalism and, by extension, its practitioners, us journalists, is a much broader world view. We have to get beyond the mind-set that locks us into localised concerns

What’s so consistently evident is that by allowing regimes to punish their domestic journalists we help to create the conditions in which the world is narrowed.

By turning a blind eye, we are complicit in the strangling of press freedom. Worse, we are complicit in the death of fellow journalists.

This is one of the major reasons for the impunity that exists in so many countries for crimes against journalists. We who fail to raise out voices, who fail to report, who fail to kick up a fuss, who fail to pressure our governments, we encourage undemocratic regimes to think that no-one cares whether they murder, imprison, abduct and intimidate journalists. It’s as if they act with our blessing.

The sad truth is that too many journalists in the west feel so comfortable. They would be appalled by my reminding them of the smug, xenophobic statement by Neville Chamberlain just before he flew off to sign the Munich agreement in which he dismissed the growing danger of ignoring the life-and death struggles “in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing.”

But that’s the reality. The sad reality. We fight for our own. We are not fighting for others. That may a slogan for Donald Trump. It may be slogan for Britain’s small-minded, little Englander Brexiteers, but it isn’t, or shouldn’t be, a slogan for Britain’s journalists.

We have a measure of freedom and we should do all we can to use it in order to ensure our fellow journalists across the globe have it too.

*This is an edited version of a speech delivered at a seminar hosted by Doughty Street Chambers and RSF earlier this month.