Ladder
Ladder: licensing and closure of outlets, in Asia
A government requires newspapers, broadcasters or news websites to register or to hold a licence, and uses that power to refuse, suspend or cancel it, or to close the outlet. Broadcast licences, which governments issue because radio and television frequencies are limited, are a common lever.
The number of entries reflects the depth of this record, not the severity of a country's conduct.
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3Punish
Legal or physical action against individual journalists or sources: subpoenas and record seizures, prosecutions, arrests, detention, expulsions, visa denials, assault where a government actor is involved.
Pakistan's parliament amended the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act to create a new Social Media Protection and Regulatory Authority with power to block online content and a Social Media Protection Tribunal, and made spreading information deemed 'fake or false' punishable by up to three years in…
Sustained · 2 sources · Full entry
4Silence
Removing outlets or channels from the public sphere: closures, licence withdrawals, forced sales, blocking and shutdowns, prior restraint, nationalisation.
In March 1913 the Ottoman government amended its 1909 press law, barring members of parliament and state officials from serving as newspaper editors and applying the ban retroactively to every periodical already in print.
Sustained 9 March 1913 · 2 sources · Full entry
In 1926, colonial authorities in the Dutch East Indies ended publication of Mawa, a newspaper linked to the Communist Association of the Indies in Soerakarta, through repeated use of Article 153 bis of the colonial Penal Code, which criminalized advocating the overthrow of the government.
Sustained 1 January 1926 · 2 sources · Full entry
Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency on June 25, 1975, and the next day her government imposed pre-press controls on every Indian newspaper, requiring official clearance before publication and later forcibly merging the country's news agencies into one.
Reversed 21 March 1977 · 1 source · Full entry
Under General Chun Doo-hwan's martial-law government, South Korean authorities ordered newsrooms in 1980 to purge journalists who had resisted press controls or joined a May sit-in strike for press freedom, and closed 172 periodicals, dismissing roughly 2,000 journalists in total.
Reversed 1 June 1987 · 2 sources · Full entry
Malaysia's government amended the Printing Presses and Publications Act in 1987 to expand its power to ban or restrict publications and to bar any court challenge to the suspension or revocation of a publishing permit.
Sustained · 2 sources · Full entry
After a failed July 2016 coup attempt, Turkey's government closed more than 100 newspapers, television and radio stations, news agencies and publishing houses by state-of-emergency decree, citing alleged links to the movement it blamed for the coup.
Sustained 31 December 2016 · 2 sources · Full entry
Cambodia's tax authority presented the independent, English-language Cambodia Daily with a $6.3 million bill the paper called arbitrary and undocumented, forcing the 24-year-old newspaper to close rather than pay, amid a wider campaign against independent media before 2018 elections.
Sustained 4 September 2017 · 2 sources · Full entry
Weeks after seizing power, Myanmar's military junta revoked the operating licenses of five independent media outlets covering protests against the coup and raided two of their newsrooms, seizing computers and files; journalists from the outlets were later arrested and charged under a broadened pena…
Sustained · 2 sources · Full entry
Apple Daily, Hong Kong's largest pro-democracy newspaper, printed its final edition after the government froze its parent company's assets and arrested its editors under the national security law imposed on the territory in 2020.
Note: A newspaper's assets were frozen and its senior editors charged with offenses carrying up to life imprisonment, ending publication entirely rather than a licensing dispute or fine.
Sustained 24 June 2021 · 3 sources · Full entry
Prime Minister Hun Sen personally ordered the license of independent outlet Voice of Democracy revoked over an article about an earthquake-aid agreement signed by his son, rejecting the outlet's published apology.
Note: The head of government personally ordered a national outlet's operating license revoked over one article, rejecting a published apology, rather than pursuing a defamation suit.
Sustained 13 February 2023 · 2 sources · Full entry
5Eliminate
Long imprisonment, killing, disappearance or forced exile of journalists, with state involvement as the sources state it.
On December 15, 2025, the High Court of Hong Kong, a special administrative region of China with its own courts, convicted Jimmy Lai, founder of the newspaper Apple Daily, on two counts of "conspiracy to commit collusion with foreign forces" under the National Security Law, which China's central go…
Sustained 8 February 2026 · 5 sources · Full entry
All ladders · Licensing and closure of outlets: by country and year · The United States chapter