PARIS, November 2. /TASS/. UNESCO has once again ignored Russia’s data on journalists’ deaths in its regular report on the safety of journalists, having betrayed its own values, the Russian mission to this organization said.
"We regret to note that the Secretary General’s report prepared by the Secretariat to the Intergovernmental Council of the International Program for the Development of Communication (IPDC) has once again failed to uphold UNESCO’s values. Once again, a significant number of journalists who have been killed, as officially reported by the Russian side, is lacking from the lists attached to the report. These journalists have also been excluded from the statistics cited in the report," the mission said.
Russian diplomats pointed to the flaws in the methodology used to select information cited by the organization’s secretariat while compiling the report and emphasized that the number of killed journalists, according to UNESCO’s allegedly "verified" data, is many times lower than the actual figure. They also called on UNESCO Director General Khaled El-Enany to condemn the killing of every journalist, to "correct the mistakes of the organization’s previous leadership, instruct the secretariat to review the methodology in collaboration with member states" and adopt the changes at the next IPDC session in 2028.
"There is no statute of limitations for crimes against journalists. Journalists killed during armed conflicts are civilians. Their murders will entail all the legal consequences associated with this status. Russia will spare no effort to ensure that all killed journalists are properly accounted for in UNESCO’s statistics and that their murders are duly condemned," the Russia mission said in a statement.
Earlier, UNESCO issued the Report on the Safety of Journalists and the Danger of Impunity, where it said that 189 journalists were killed from the beginning of 2024 to late 2025. As many as 127 of them were killed in zones of combat operations. According to the report, 40% of these deaths were caused by drone attacks. The bulk of the fatalities were reported in Palestine (62), Mexico (17), and Sudan (14). The conflict in Ukraine, according to the UNESCO statistics, claimed the lives of 12 reporters during this period.