KUWAIT CITY, Oct 20, (Agencies): Kuwait, known for its relatively free press, and most other energy-rich Arab states in the Gulf have dropped in the world press rankings of 2010, Reporters Without Borders said on Wednesday.

Kuwait, which in 2009 topped the Arab world at 60th place, fell 27 positions to tie for second place with the United Arab Emirates (UAE), mainly because of its harsh treatment of writer Abdulqader al-Jassem.
Lebanon, though dropping 17 places compared to last year, topped the list in the Arab world at 78th place.

The media watchdog said Jassem, 54, who is a lawyer, journalist and blogger, has been jailed twice following accusations lodged by “prominent figures with close ties to the regime.”

“This contradicts the authorities’ stated desire to project an image of being the leading democracy of the Gulf,” Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said after releasing the 2010 world press freedom index.
Jassem faces several court cases and in one of them he is charged with attempting to overthrow the government. He was detained for 49 days in May and for 11 days in November. Most of the cases against him were filed by Prime Minister His Highness Sheikh Nasser Mohammad Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah over slander charges.

Qatar also dropped 27 places to 121 position on a list of 178 countries, RSF said, without elaborating.
Bahrain slipped from 119th to 144th place as a result of the “growing number of imprisonments and trials, notably against bloggers and netizens,” RSF said in a statement.

Oman ranked 124th, down 17 places from last year, while the UAE dropped just one place to 87.
Bucking the trend, conservative Saudi Arabia went up the list six places to 157, but remained in last place among the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) alliance, RSF said.

RSF compiles its annual table by scoring each country in the light of 43 criteria measuring violence and persecution against journalists, censorship and self-censorship, and the financial and legal independence of media.

Meanwhile, Rwanda and Syria joined a list of the 10 most repressive countries toward journalists alongside North Korea, Myanmar, China and Iran, according to a global media watchdog which warned Tuesday that the crackdown on reporters in authoritarian countries is worsening.

Reporters Without Borders said press freedom in the 10 countries — including Yemen, Sudan, Turkmenistan and Eritrea — continues to deteriorate.

Harder
“It is getting harder to say which is worse than the other,” the group said, with all 10 persecuting the media and blocking news and information to their citizens.

The Paris-based organization said Cuba was not in the bottom 10 for the first time since the index was created in 2002, due mainly to the release of 14 journalists and 22 activists over the summer. But it said the political dissidents and journalists still have to deal with censorship and repression by the Communist government on a daily basis.

Reporters Without Borders’ annual ranking of press freedom in 178 countries praised six northern European countries — Finland, Iceland, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland — for topping the index since it was created in 2002 and setting an example for respecting journalists and protecting the media from judicial abuse.

But it warned that the European Union risks losing its position as world leader in respecting freedom of the press, noting that while 13 of the EU’s 27 members are in the top 20 some of the other 14 are very low in the rankings including Italy at 49, Romania at 52 and Greece and Romania tied at 70.

“The defense of media freedom continues to be a battle — a battle of vigilance in the democracies of old Europe and a battle against oppression and injustice in the totalitarian regimes still scattered across the globe,” Reporters Without Borders Secretary-General Jean-Francois Julliard said in the report.