Reporters Without Borders

• 1. Introduction

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  Reporters Without Borders keeps a yearly count of journalists killed on the job. That single practice captures something essential about the organisation: it believes that named deaths, added up one by one, are harder to ignore than abstractions about press freedom. Founded in Montpellier, France, in 1985, the group built its identity around that conviction, and it has spent four decades testing whether naming names and counting bodies can change anything.

  The organisation operates under its French initials, RSF, which stand for Reporters sans frontières. It is headquartered in Paris and carries consultative status at the United Nations, UNESCO, the Council of Europe, and the International Organisation of the Francophonie. What draws those institutions to the table? What does RSF actually do on the ground for journalists in danger? And how does a non-governmental organisation measure something as contested as press freedom across 180 countries?

• 2. Founding and Structure

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  Robert Ménard, Rémy Loury, Jacques Molénat, and Émilien Jubineau founded RSF in Montpellier in 1985. Ménard served as its first secretary general. The organisation was registered formally as a non-profit in 1995, a decade after it began operating.

  Christophe Deloire was appointed secretary-general in 2012. He held the position until his death in June 2024. Thibaut Bruttin succeeded him, taking the post in November 2024.

  By 2018, the Paris head office employed 57 salaried staff, and RSF had built a network of 146 correspondents worldwide. It maintained 13 regional and national offices, located in cities including Brussels, London, Washington, Berlin, Rio de Janeiro, Taipei, and Dakar. A board of governors elected from RSF's members sets policy, while an International Council provides oversight and approves the budget.

  In August 2025, the Office of the Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation declared RSF an undesirable organisation in Russia, effectively banning its operations within the country.

• 3. Measuring Press Freedom

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  RSF publishes the World Press Freedom Index every year, rating the state of media freedom in 180 countries. The index gives governments, journalists, and the public a single ranked document against which to measure change over time.

  The organisation also issues daily briefings and press releases on threats to media freedom in seven languages: French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Persian, and Chinese. That range reflects a deliberate attempt to reach journalists and readers inside the countries under scrutiny, not just an international audience watching from the outside.

  Annual reports put numbers to the toll. RSF said 110 journalists were killed in the course of their work in 2015. In 2016, it counted 348 imprisoned journalists and 52 hostages, with nearly two-thirds of those imprisoned held in Turkey, China, Syria, Egypt, and Iran. Its 2018 report recorded more than 80 journalists killed, 348 currently imprisoned, and another 60 held hostage.

• 4. Direct Action and Campaigns

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  RSF's ground-level work ranges from individual rescue efforts to large symbolic gestures. During 2017, the organisation opened a centre for women journalists in Afghanistan, staged a creative protest with street artist C215 in Strasbourg in solidarity with Turkish journalists in detention, and turned off the lights of the Eiffel Tower as a tribute to murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

  In July 2018, RSF sent a mission to Saudi Arabia calling for the release of 30 journalists. The organisation maintains the Press Freedom Barometer online, tracking the number of journalists, media workers, and citizen journalists killed or imprisoned. It also publishes a gallery of Predators of Press Freedom, naming the most egregious international violators.

  Operation Collateral Freedom, launched in 2014, takes a technical approach: RSF creates mirror sites for censored websites, giving readers in restricted countries an alternative route to blocked information. By the programme's sixth year, marked on World Day Against Cyber Censorship on the 12th of March 2020, a total of 21 websites had been unblocked across 12 countries, including Iran, China, Saudi Arabia, and Vietnam.

  On the 22nd of December 2023, RSF filed a complaint with the International Criminal Court over the killing of seven Palestinian journalists, including Samer Abu Daqqa. In March 2025, RSF named four journalists as priority campaigns for the year: Frenchie Mae Cumpio of the Philippines, Sandra Muhoza of Burundi, Sevinj Vagifgizi of Azerbaijan, and Pham Doan Trang of Vietnam.

• 5. Building Trust in Journalism

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  RSF launched the Journalism Trust Initiative in 2018, alongside partners including the European Broadcasting Union, Agence France-Presse, and the Global Editors Network. The initiative sets indicators around transparency, governance, and accountability, focusing on the process by which journalism is created rather than evaluating the content itself.

  Standards developed under JTI have fed into policy frameworks in Canada and the European Union. By November 2025, more than 2,000 media organisations worldwide had registered with the initiative, including the Associated Press and BBC World News.

  A 2023 analysis by the Center for International Media Assistance concluded that initiatives like JTI could be significant in encouraging more accurate reporting, but that measuring success remained difficult given the complexity of how platform algorithms respond to trust signals. RSF also publishes the Munich Charter, a document that sets out the rights and obligations of journalists. The charter was first published in Munich in 1971 by the German Journalist Association, and has since been adopted by most journalists' unions in Europe.

• 6. Prizes and Recognition

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  RSF's annual Press Freedom Prize, created in 1992, honours journalists who have faced threats or imprisonment and who have challenged abuses of power. The first winner that year was Zlatko Dizdarevic from Bosnia-Herzegovina. In 2018, RSF expanded the prize into new categories covering courage, independence, and impact.

  In 2023, RSF introduced the Lucas Dolega-SAIF Photo Prize, named for Lucas Dolega, a young photographer killed in 2011. A year later, in 2024, the organisation added the Mohamed Maiga Prize for African Investigative Journalism, honouring the Malian investigative journalist and his commitment to social justice.

  RSF's Netizen Prize, introduced in 2010 in partnership with Google, recognises bloggers and cyber-dissidents who have advanced freedom of information online. The organisation also raises funds through a photography book titled 100 Photos for Press Freedom; RSF said it raised nearly a quarter of its total funds from book sales in 2018.

  Among the international recognitions the organisation has received: in 2005, RSF shared the European Parliament's Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought with Nigerian human rights lawyer Hauwa Ibrahim and Cuba's Ladies in White movement. In 2009, it shared the Roland Berger Human Dignity Award with Iranian human rights lawyer and Nobel peace laureate Shirin Ebadi. In 2019, RSF received the Dan David Prize for Defending Democracy, jointly with Michael Ignatieff. The 2025 Press Freedom Prize for Courage went to Sevinj Vagifgizi of Azerbaijan, one of the four journalists RSF had named as a priority campaign that same year.