Country protection list

WMF does not release aggregations of sensitive data in countries identified by independent organizations as potentially dangerous for journalists or internet freedom. Each year we will look at lists published by organizations like Reporters Without Borders and Freedom on the Net and combine the lowest rated countries into the protection list. For 2023, the list is as follows:

• Countries deemed "Not Free" in Freedom on the Net's 2022 report: Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Belarus, China, Cuba, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Kazakhstan, Myanmar, Pakistan, Russia, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Thailand, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Vietnam
• Countries with the lowest scores according to Reporters Without Borders: Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belarus, China, Cuba, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Honduras, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Laos, Myanmar, Nicaragua, North Korea, Oman, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkmenistan, Venezuela, Vietnam, Yemen

Combining the two lists together yields a list of 35 countries:

• Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belarus, China, Cuba, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Honduras, Iran, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Laos, Myanmar, Nicaragua, North Korea, Oman, Pakistan, Russia, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Thailand, Turkey, Turkmenistan, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Vietnam, Yemen

You can find the country protection list in Hive as the htriedman.country_protection_list and htriedman.non_country_protection_list, as well as in the is_protected column of canonical_data.countries.

Code blocks

The following (python) code snippets are made available for easy copy-pasting:

country_protection_list = ["Afghanistan", "Azerbaijan", "Bahrain", "Bangladesh", "Belarus", "China", "Cuba", "Djibouti", "Egypt", "Eritrea", "Ethiopia", "Honduras", "Iran", "Iraq", "Kazakhstan", "Kuwait", "Laos", "Myanmar", "Nicaragua", "North Korea", "Oman", "Pakistan", "Russia", "Rwanda", "Saudi Arabia", "Sudan", "Syria", "Thailand", "Turkey", "Turkmenistan", "United Arab Emirates", "Uzbekistan", "Venezuela", "Vietnam", "Yemen"]

country_protection_list_iso = ["AF", "AZ", "BH", "BD", "BY", "CN", "CU", "DJ", "EG", "ER", "ET", "HN", "IR", "IQ", "KZ", "KW", "LA", "MM", "NI", "KP", "OM", "PK", "RU", "RW", "SA", "SD", "SY", "TH", "TR", "TM", "AE", "UZ", "VE", "VN", "YE"]