Gene Boyd Lumawag

New York, June 9, 2008--The Committee to Protect Journalists condemned a militant group's abduction of three journalists from Philippine network ABS-CBN in the southern Philippine province of Sulu on Sunday.

ABS-CBN news head Maria Ressa provided CPJ with an official statement today confirming that journalist Ces Drilon, cameraman Jimmy Encarnacion, and assistant cameraman Angelo Valderama disappeared while in Sulu.

May 15, 2006

Her Excellency Gloria Macapagal Arroyo
President, Republic of the Philippines
Malacañang Palace
Manila, Philippines

Via Facsimile: +63-2-735-6152

Your Excellency:

The Committee to Protect Journalists is deeply troubled by recent statements made by presidential spokesman Ignacio Bunye and the Philippine National Police (PNP) that many of the cases of journalists killed in the country have been solved and that the cases are unrelated to the issue of press freedom.

Here are the Philippine journalists killed in connection with their work since 2000, as documented by the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Manila, Philippines, June 26, 2005—Despite Philippine government claims that it has solved more than half of journalist murders since 1986, a joint mission by the Committee to Protect Journalists and the Southeast Asian Press Alliance has found that the official definition of "solved cases" is misleading, that justice has not been served in the vast majority of cases, and that journalists in remote provinces remain vulnerable to fatal attacks.

The Five Most Murderous Countries for Journalists

The Philippines

Although the Philippines has one of the freest presses in Asia, the country was the deadliest in the region for journalists for the second consecutive year. Eight journalists—primarily rural radio broadcasters—were gunned down in retaliation for their work in 2004. (Five reporters died in the line of duty in 2003, according to CPJ research.) Worldwide, the media casualty rate in the Philippines was second only to Iraq.

New York, November 15, 2004—The Committee to Protect Journalists strongly condemns the two fatal attacks on Philippine journalists over the weekend, the latest killings in an already record-breaking year for violence against the press in the Philippines.

An unidentified gunman shot photographer Gene Boyd Lumawag, of the MindaNews news service, in the head, killing him instantly on Friday, November 12, in Jolo, the capital of the southern Sulu Province.