The surprise announcement by the foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, of a £1m fund to safeguard press freedom around the world is welcome. Yes, the sum is tiny. And, yes, critics will view it as an attempt by him, or the government, to gain political kudos. And yes again, it represents the very minimum of effort in the face of the daily, deadly threats to journalism in countries where we maintain business and diplomatic links.

For all that, it is a small, somewhat hesitant, step in the right direction. It is a recognition, albeit belated, of the scale of the crisis in which, to quote Johnson, “worldwide attacks on journalists are rife and increasing”. Where has he been living for the past decade? Those attacks have been “rife and increasing” year upon year. Scores of journalists have been murdered in Mexico, Russia, Syria, Iraq, Somalia and Pakistan.

Hundreds more journalists have been jailed on bogus charges and intimidated in Turkey, Egypt, Bahrain, Kazakhstan, Rwanda, Burundi and South Sudan. The list of dishonour now comes closer to home with the killing last month, by car bomb in Malta, of Daphne Caruana Galizia, a reporter who was investigating political corruption. Rightly, there have been calls for an independent investigation, including to the European commission by the heads of eight of the world’s largest news organisations, including the Guardian’s editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner.

Press freedom is under perpetual attack in so many countries where democracy is unstable or does not exist at all. In such places, the journalists who try to inform the people of what is happening are nothing short of heroes and deserve all the help we can give them. To that end, Johnson might consider giving support to an initiative just launched by the international press freedom watchdog, Reporters Without Borders (RWB) – of which I sit on the UK board – and the Freedom Voices Network, which is going to publicise the work of journalists that their murderers wish to suppress.

Called Forbidden Stories, it aims to give life to the investigations carried out by journalists who have been killed or arrested. The messengers may be murdered or incarcerated, but their messages will survive. By publishing the information that journalists risk their lives to report, RWB’s secretary general, Christophe Deloire, says the project will “use journalism to defend journalism”. He believes it will “send a strong message to press freedom’s predators throughout the world”.

There is a proactive element, too, because Forbidden Stories is also planning to engage in collaborative investigations along with a network of international media. The first journalism to benefit from the project was produced by three Mexicans (of the 11 who have been murdered in that country in 2017): Cecilio Pineda, Miroslava Breach and Javier Valdez.

They were killed because they dared to investigate the corrupt relationships between Mexico’s drug cartels and politicians. Pineda, editor of a newspaper in the state of Guerrero, La Voz de Tierra Caliente, was shot dead in March hours after posting a Facebook video in which he highlighted the alleged friendship between the head of a criminal gang and a local legislator.

Later the same month, Breach died after four shots were fired at her at close range outside her home in Chihuahua City. She had published the names of municipal election candidates who she said were secretly backed by drug traffickers. Two weeks after her death, her newspaper, Norte de Ciudad Juarez, was closed down.
Valdez, an award-winning journalist and co-founder of the newspaper Ríodoce in Culiacán, capital of Sinaloa state, was shot dead in May after coming under pressure not to publish an interview with a drug lord. Sinaloa is the base of one of the largest and most violent of Mexico’s drug cartels.

Documentary film-maker Angus Macqueen noted in a Guardian tribute to the bravery of Valdez that as a result of his death we will know less about what is happening in Mexico. At least, with Forbidden Stories, some of his work will live on. Other journalists elsewhere in the world who feel threatened may also use the project because it offers an encrypted repository to protect them and their work.

But will the killers of Pineda, Breach and Valdez ever be found? Will the authorities even bother to investigate their deaths? The awful truth is that the overwhelming majority of these murderers are safe, as proved by a tragic survey produced annually over the last 10 years by the New York-based press freedom body the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Its latest “global impunity index”, which ranks countries where journalists are murdered and their killers go free, is replete with the usual suspects, including Mexico, Russia and Somalia (which is the worst country for unsolved murders for the third year in a row).

I have been writing about the problem of impunity for as long as CPJ has been compiling its index and after listening to arguments made forcefully by the former director of the International News Safety Institute Rodney Pinder. Too many people think most journalists die when covering wars. Nothing could be further from the truth. The majority die while trying to shine a light on matters within the borders of their own countries. They are the murders that are rarely investigated because the authorities who are supposed to be enforcers of the law are themselves the perpetrators. So there is no incentive for them to investigate.

As the CPJ points out, countries that like to call themselves democracies repeatedly feature on the impunity index. They thumb their noses at demands by human rights bodies for proper investigations into the deaths of journalists. They do not even heed calls by the United Nations, which has adopted an anti-impunity plan of action. Its request to states to take measures to promote justice when journalists are attacked has been ignored.

Consider these disgraceful facts. The 12 countries on the CPJ index accounted for nearly 80% of the unsolved murders of journalists that took place worldwide during the past decade. Four of those countries – Mexico, the Philippines, India and Nigeria – are on the governing council of the community of democracies, a coalition supposedly dedicated to upholding and strengthening democratic norms. It’s enough to make journalists weep.

Perhaps the most disheartening factor of all is the lack of protection afforded to journalists who receive death threats. The CPJ figures show that around 40% of murder victims were threatened in advance. These are not only attacks on journalists and on press freedom. Given what these reporters are attempting to do – trying to inform people about what is being done by their country’s government and various state institutions – they should be seen as assaults on the public themselves.

It may be regarded as trite within western democracies to talk of journalism as a mission to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. In countries where democracy is fragile or non-existent, it is anything but a cliche.

I want to see the £1m pledge by Johnson as about more than the money. It is a recognition, at long last, that Britain, where press freedom first flourished, is taking seriously the pressures on journalism elsewhere in the world. It might be naive to be optimistic. After all, modern British governments have not had a great track record on press freedom. But it offers a glimmer of hope. Let us, at least, see it in positive terms.