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A Bill Comes Due for Marie Colvin’s Death

A federal court orders Syria’s government to pay the American journalist’s family $302.5 million for what the judge called her deliberate killing.

Marie Colvin in 2011.Credit...Writer Pictures, via Associated Press

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A war correspondent of extraordinary courage, Marie Colvin knew the danger she faced. She had reported from such places as Iraq, Chechnya, East Timor, Sierra Leone and Sri Lanka, where she lost an eye to a government-fired rocket-propelled grenade. Her last war, the Syrian Army’s bombardment of rebels in Homs, she told a friend, was “the worst we’ve ever seen.” But it was not a stray round that killed her and a French photojournalist, Rémi Ochlik, there in February 2012.

“Officials at the highest level of the Syrian government carefully planned and executed the artillery assault on the Baba Amr media center for the specific purpose of killing the journalists inside,” wrote Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia last week in awarding Ms. Colvin’s relatives $302.5 million, including $300 million in punitive damages against the Syrian strongman, Bashar al-Assad, and his associates. “She was specifically targeted because of her profession, for the purpose of silencing those reporting on the growing opposition movement in the country,” Judge Jackson wrote.

Ms. Colvin’s relatives may never collect the money, though there is frozen al-Assad loot outside Syria they could eventually tap. The greater importance of the ruling — which was based in part on a trove of documents smuggled out of Syria by defectors that also implicate the al-Assad regime in innumerable crimes against humanity — is to shine a light on the dangers journalists face around the world not only from the violence they cover but also from autocratic rulers who would silence them.

Ms. Colvin, an American who reported for The Sunday Times of London and other outlets, has gained considerable renown since her death and is the subject of a movie, “A Private War”; a biography, “In Extremis”; and a documentary, “Under the Wire.” But the targeting of journalists has also increased in these intervening years.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, the number of reporters killed in retaliation for their work doubled in the past year to at least 34. The most prominent was Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist and Washington Post columnist who disappeared in October after entering the Saudi Consulate in Turkey. The overwhelming evidence is that he was murdered and dismembered on the orders of the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

The committee said 54 journalists were killed doing their jobs last year, including four in an attack on The Capital Gazette in Maryland in June. At least 250 reporters were in prison, many of them in Turkey, Egypt and China. Two Reuters reporters, U Wa Lone and U Kyaw Soe Oo, are in prison in Myanmar after reporting on the killing of Rohingya Muslims.

Ms. Colvin and Mr. Khashoggi were among reporters shown in The Washington Post’s Super Bowl ad on Sunday dedicated to journalists who were killed or who disappeared as a result of their work. The ad, narrated by Tom Hanks, ended with The Post’s slogan, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

Dictators have always tried to silence a free press. But the deliberate targeting of reporters like Ms. Colvin reflects a new and distressing trend among authoritarian leaders to view the independent media solely as an enemy to be eliminated, if necessary by death. The Syrian documents presented in court had Syrian leaders celebrating her death.

To them, Judge Jackson said, independent reporters were “enemies of the state.” That is not so different from President Trump’s depiction of the press as “enemies of the people” or his relentless unloading on “fake news” at his rallies — words that can only encourage violence against journalists.

Against that, it is good to know that an American judge is prepared to let Mr. al-Assad, and thereby all autocrats who seek to silence free speech, know that their actions have a heavy cost, to their people and, one hopes, to themselves.

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 26 of the New York edition with the headline: When Journalists Are Targets. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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