Putin & Press Freedom.

Reporters from around the world who gather in Moscow on May 28 are poised to stand up for their colleagues in a country where the media and journalists are increasingly under attack. The 1,000 news media representatives plan to establish a commission to finally investigate the growing number of unsolved murders of journalists in Putin's Russia.

Russia now is the third deadliest country for journalists, after Iraq and Algeria, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Since 2000, when President Putin was first elected, at least 14 journalists have been murdered because of their work. None of these murders have been solved.

A journalists' commission is no substitute for what Putin's government has denied - justice. But it should draw attention to their murders and what they were investigating. It may help focus attention on the methodical destruction of the fledgling free press which sprouted in Russia after the fall of Communism. After Putin took over, TV stations were the first to lose their independence. Major newspapers are increasingly controlled by those who do the state's bidding. The radio correspondents for the Russian News Service, the main source of news for radio stations, recently resigned to protest censorship by new owners. And the Russian Union of Journalists, a strong voice against the march to silence any independent reporting, was ordered to leave its Moscow headquarters just days before the international conference. The few remaining critics increasingly write or speak out at their peril, as new laws tighten the government's grip.

Most recently, the definition of extremism has been expanded to include media criticism of state officials. That can mean jail time for the reporter and the shutting down of the news outlet. Nina Ognianova of the Committee to Protect Journalists puts it this way: "The process of squeezing critical journalism out of the public space is now near complete". In the meantime, polls show Putin's popularity has soared. Fewer Russians can see or hear from anyone who opposes him, his policies or his government.

Instances of media crack-downs are spurred by local contexts but are part of a growing repression of various forms of public dissent, including non-governmental organisations (NGOs). In Russia recently, local authorities took steps they apparently believed would limit the PR damage to the failing EU-Russia summit in Samara: police arrested organisers of a protest by the opposition "Other Russia" movement as well as journalists who had been trying to interview them. They raided the Samara offices of the opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta, seizing computers and blocking publication of the paper's edition of that day. While those arrested were quickly released, it was a reminder of wider official crack-downs on Russia's few remaining independent media voices.

Likely to get more attention at the May 28 World Congress of Journalists is the announced eviction of Russia's 100,000-member journalists' union from its offices to make way for the state-funded RIA-Novosti's English cable news network, Russia Today. Mikhail Melnikov, an analyst with the Moscow-based Centre for Journalism in Extreme Situations, an independent NGO, says: "Today the electronic media is mostly in the hands of the state. From the pluralism of the 1990s, we have arrived at near-complete uniformity. The only thing demanded of journalists is loyalty to the authorities. The zone of criticism has become so narrow that the population is no longer in a position to understand what's going on in the country".

The Washington-based Freedom House recently reported that Russia fell six places, to the 165th spot, in the group's annual rankings of political freedom. The report noted that although Russia's constitution provided for press freedom, "authorities are able to use the legislative and judicial systems to harass and prosecute independent journalists". The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists concurred, identifying Russia recently as one of 10 top "backsliders" on press freedoms.

Moises Naim, editor and publisher of Foreign Policy magazine, says such press censorship has evolved from a "heavy hand of the state that directly takes over operations" to a more indirect form, which often takes the shape of scrutiny by tax authorities or by economic boycotts. Last year, his magazine published "The First Law of Petropolitics", an article by Thomas Friedman, positing that "the price of oil and the pace of freedom always move in opposite directions in oil-rich petrolist states". But he says that press censorship is not restricted to oil-rich nations - that repression is as intense in Argentina as it is in Venezuela, for example. Still, Christopher Walker at Freedom House says the stakes are raised in states such as Russia or Iran, with weak institutions, when there are booms in energy cycles. He says: "It gives regimes that are not inclined to play by the rules the resources to have a freer hand. It opens the doors for authorities and other power holders to steal resources".