ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia (AP) – Ethiopia tops a list of 10 countries – including three in sub-Saharan Africa – where press freedom has deteriorated over the past five years, a New York-based media advocacy group said yesterday, as several nations around the world mark International Press Freedom Day.

The Committee to Protect Journalists said the nations “reflect a mixture of relatively open countries that have turned increasingly repressive and traditionally restrictive nations where press conditions, remarkably, have worsened”.

Three countries on the list – Ethiopia, Gambia and Congo – show that “democracy’s foothold in Africa is shallow when it comes to press freedom”, 0 CPJ executive director Joel Simon said in the report.

“These three African nations, as diverse as they are, have won praise at times for their transition to democracy – but they are actually moving in reverse on press issues,” Simon said. “Journalists in Ethiopia, Gambia, and DRC (Congo) are being jailed, attacked, and censored, a picture far worse than what we saw only a few years ago.”

Other nations on the list are Russia, Cuba, Pakistan, Egypt, Azerbaijan, Morocco and Thailand. Countries in which conflict was ongoing, such as Iraq and Somalia, were not included because of instability and lack of governance.

Ethiopian government spokesman Zemedkun Tekle defended his country’s media system.

“Freedom of the press does not mean that they are going to do whatever they want, unlawful things,” he said. “We can only talk about the freedom of press when the press is going to respect the law of the land.”

He also said the country’s parliament is debating a new press law to better define the media’s role and restrictions in Ethiopia, but he refused to discuss details.

Many of the government’s crackdowns resulted from a contentious 2005 parliamentary election in which riots over the election results ended with the jailing of more than 100 political opposition leaders and journalists.

Twenty-five have since been released, among them eight journalists.

On Tuesday, the OpenNet initiative, a Web group dedicated to open access to websites, cited Ethiopia’s censorship of anti-government Websites and blogs, a charge Ethiopian officials denied.

“This is a baseless allegation,” Zemedkun said, adding that any blocks were the result of “a technical problem”.

The nations were judged on seven criteria: government censorship, judicial harassment, criminal libel prosecutions, journalists’ deaths, physical attacks on the press, journalists’ imprisonments and threats against the press.

In Pakistan, the CPJ said, eight journalists have been slain since 2002, but arrests and convictions have been won in only one case. In Russia, 11 journalists have been killed in the last five years, but no case has been solved, the report said.