PAKISTAN has been ranked 10th out of a list of 14 countries on the Committee to Protect Journalists' (CPJ) Impunity Index. The appropriately named index is an interesting, if macabre, concept. Though the CPJ investigates and monitors the many ways of oppression of journalists, which includes incarceration and torture, this particular index only tabulates actual murder. Or rather, only unsolved murder cases. And even in those, it does not include those deaths that are a result of reporting in a combat zone or where they get killed by stray bullets in a suddenly violent street procession. To further make the process tougher, only those countries with five or more unsolved journalist murder cases were included in the list. The period examined spanned about ten years. The Impunity Index is appropriately named because it quantifies the seeming impunity that is granted to the killers of journalists in these countries. Pakistan fares pretty badly on this front, as those journalists who were slain whose cases remain unsolved number ten, an average of a murder a year; even though 2008 was a spike year, with a whopping three unsolved journalist murders. To quote the CPJ, "In a deteriorating security situation, journalists have come under threat from a wide range of militant religious and criminal organizations, some with links to Pakistani intelligence." These are, of course, chilling words. But it would be difficult to differentiate these trends from lapses in the judicial system in general. Journalists can have personal feuds as well. But anyone in the know in Pakistani journalism, knows of the many dangers our brave correspondents out in the field face, specially those in the conflict-hit FATA and NWFP. Elected officials in the rural areas and some in the country's largest city also have a history of suppressing journalists. It is time not just for governments to speed up these cases, but also for the various media establishments, who have increasingly come of means, to compensate their staff in a way that is commensurate with the dangers they face.