Officials and prosecutors who arbitrarily detain journalists or impose blanket restrictions on free expression should be subject to a new regime of targeted international sanctions, according to a panel report drafted by the barrister Amal Clooney.

The proposal, coming in the midst of an unprecedented era of attacks on the rights of journalists, represents a blueprint for a radical extension of potential sanctions to protect reporters in countries such as Turkey, Iran or Saudi Arabia.

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At present journalists are only protected through human rights sanctions in a small number of countries, notably the US and Canada. The UK is due to bring into force its own post-Brexit sanctions regime this spring. The foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, has already met Clooney to discuss her proposals, and officials have suggested the UK will prioritise 30 listed countries as “a cause for concern” in the foreign office annual human rights report.

Clooney was appointed by the previous foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, as his special envoy on media freedom at a time when he decided that a campaign for a free press worldwide should become a central part of the UK’s soft power projection.

Her report, prepared with the International Bar Association Human Rights Institute, documents the extent to which repressive regimes are resorting to extra-judicial killings, torture, abductions, intimidation and arrests in what amounts to a world-wide assault on free expression. In 2019 more than 250 journalists around the world were in prison because of their work, including an increasing number accused of spreading false news.

Clooney’s panel recommends targeted sanctions on officials who restrict free expression, including freezing the individual’s assets or withholding travel visas. The sanctions could be imposed unilaterally by governments, or by consortia of states. Unjust imprisonment of reporters would meet the threshold for sanctions, the report says, and the penalties could be imposed not just on the officials charging the journalist, but also prosecutors and judges deemed to be complicit in the sentencing.

“A consistent use of targeted sanctions when journalists are killed and arbitrarily imprisoned would help to raise international awareness and shift the default from impunity to accountability,” the report says. “There is an important opportunity for states to lead with a new paradigm that when the media is attacked, targeted sanctions will be a counterattack.”

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The report denies that the proposals will “open the floodgates” to the imposition of too many sanctions covering any violation of the rights to liberty or a fair trial. It points out the Magnitsky laws, which authorise the US government to sanction those who it sees as human rights offenders, make clear there has to be a serious abuse of human rights, including a prolonged detention without charge, for sanctions to be contemplated. An independent national committee of senior jurists might also be appointed to advise governments of repressive acts against reporters that might warrant sanctions.

Clooney’s report says that at present only the US, Canada and the UK in outline have adopted sanctions regimes as a weapon to protect human rights.

Canada and the UK, which set up the panel that Clooney leads, staged a joint conference in London last summer on media freedom at which more than 30 states signed a global pledge on media freedom. Clooney proposes these 30 states could form an opening group declaring support for a sanctions regime.

The report admits it has not addressed the issue of whether sanctions could be imposed on a repressive government as a whole. Some of the most serious restrictions on media freedom come through state-censorship of newspapers and social media as opposed to harassment of individual reporters.

“Targeted sanctions are among the most effective tools in a government’s arsenal to enforce human rights obligations, including the obligation to respect free speech and protect the media,” Clooney said on Thursday. “It is the hope of the panel that governments will look to the recommendations in this report to curb human rights abuses and do more to protect journalists around the world.”



