Founded in 1981, the Committee to Protect Journalists is the world’s leading monitor of abuses against journalists. As a leader, CPJ stays current on the best work of other organizations. It has been impressed with the highly structured project by the Inter American Press Association to fight “impunity’’ for those who would kill journalists. The decade-long IAPA Impunity campaign has produced more than 75 convictions in cases of the murder of journalists, and changed national laws to remove statues of limitations and provide federal prosecution for those who would kill human rights workers, journalists, judges and other people working for civil society.

CPJ studied impunity worldwide and chose very different countries, Russia and the Philippines, to test techniques pioneered by IAPA. During the next two years, CPJ will raise the public profile of impunity in Russia and the Philippines by campaigning for arrests to be made in the murders of journalists and investigating and publishing information about the deaths of journalists and missing journalists. As a result, the level of impunity in those countries – now among the highest in the world – is expected to go down. Further expansions may be warranted by these experiments.