The United Arab Emirates is among the 25 countries in the world with the lowest level of corruption.
The UAE took 21st place among 180 countries in the international corruption perception ranking compiled by Transparency International.
The United Arab Emirates improved its perception of corruption from 66 points in 2016 to 71 in 2017 and became the country with the lowest level of perception of corruption in the region of the Middle East and North Africa.
The index relies on a scale from 0 to 100, where 0 is used for highly corrupt economies.
Representatives of Transparency International commented on the results: "In some countries across the region, Asia-Pacific journalists are threatened, even killed by law enforcement or monitoring agencies, and even killed in the worst cases."
“The Philippines, India and the Maldives have one of the worst situations in this regard. These countries have a good sense of corruption and have less freedom of the press and higher mortality among journalists,” they added.
Over the past six years, 15 journalists working on corruption investigations in these countries have been killed, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).
In the latest ranking, New Zealand and Denmark got the highest rates, Syria, South Sudan and Somalia got the lowest.
Meanwhile, China with a score of 41 points took 77th place in the list, while Brazil took 96th place with a score of 37 points, and Russia took 135th place with a score of 29 points for the second year in a row.
An in-depth analysis of the results shows that the countries with the lowest levels of protection for the press and non-governmental organizations also have the worst levels of corruption.
An analysis that includes CPJ data showed that over the past six years, 9 out of 10 journalists have been killed in countries rated at 45 or less on the index.
