IN DUBLIN, as in Washington or Ottawa or Tokyo, World Press Freedom Day hadnot significant date. That changed irrevocably on June 26th, 1996.

In one terrible instant, Dublin was linked to capital cities like Dushanbe and Algiers and Moscow and Phnom Penh. These are all places where journalists - local workaday journalists, not visiting foreign correspondents or politicians with press cards - were murdered last year.

Unlike Dublin, however, these killings are no longer a shock, as reporters had also been assassinated in those cities the year before, and the year before that.

In such places World Press Freedom Day has acquired a precise and bitter relevance.

If it were not for Veronica Guerin - or, more precisely. If it were not for the men who planned and carried out her murder - most Irish journalists would probably pay little heed to this day dedicated to the cause of press freedom around the world.

There was little objective cause to do so. The Republic of Ireland had not been a country where reporters feared imprisonment or violent reprisals for their news columns.

But when Veronica Guerin was killed her death underscored the fragility of a freedom which most Western journalists still tend to take for granted. This complacency seems especially acute in the United States, where powerful press lords and two centuries of constitutional case law have given the press a degree of independence and political clout unsurpassed anywhere.

In New York, which likes to think of itself as the news media capital of the world, only a few of the thousands of working journalists here will give May 3rd even a passing thought. The unvoiced assumption is that this is someone else's problem, someone else's battle.

The irony is that this is our battle. Local journalists who face jail and worse for doing their jobs are often working directly or indirectly for media in New York or London - and for their readers and listeners throughout the world.

In an interdependent world, the reporters and camera crews of Central Africa and Central America are on the front lines for all of us, gathering at great risk the news we read and watch at home. Ethics and collegial solidarity aside, it is in our interest to come to their defence.

World Press Freedom Day is a good time to start.

It is, admittedly, a rather recent and somewhat fabricated holiday. May 3rd is the anniversary of an obscure 1991 conference on press freedom sponsored by UNESCO, which had previously been hostile to the concept and was intent on making amends.

THE decision urged by UN bureaucrats and endorsed by the General Assembly to commemorate this date had more to do with an institutional desire to appease the media than it did to any genuine commitment to free speech or independent reporting.

It is also true that World Press Freedom Day is celebrated mainly in nations where press freedom is more aspiration than reality. Yet journalists in such countries as Turkey and Algeria find its observance a useful ritual, even if its official observance is an exercise in hypocrisy.

The simple public acknowledgment of the universal right to free and uncensored information can send a powerful message. It can also lead to a recognition that independent news gathering often comes at a great cost.

Veronica Guerin was one of 26 journalists who were murdered in reprisal for their work in 1996. Over the past decade more than 400 reporters, broadcasters and publishers have been assassinated because of what they said or wrote.

Algerians, Colombians, Tajiks and Croatians have suffered the most. But as the Guerin case showed, it is not only in countries ravaged by warfare that journalists are at risk. (Few Americans are aware that seven US journalists were murdered in the past 10 years because of their reporting or political commentary. That they were all immigrant reporters working in languages other than English is just one reason for this lack of awareness.)

At the Committee to Protect Journalists, where I work, we document these cases as meticulously as we can, to demonstrate convincingly to critics - and to our fellow reporters - the journalistic integrity of the victims, and the likely casual links between their professions and their deaths.

Veronica Guerin's murder was very much the exception to the rule: in most of those 400 cases there was little or no political pressure to pursue the killers, and hence no serious investigations or attempts at prosecution.

HOMICIDE may be the ultimate act of censorship, but solitary confinement is also quite effective, repressive governments have found. At the beginning of this year at least 185 journalists were serving prison terms in 24 countries because they had reported facts or voiced opinions that their governments found objectionable.

Not all of these nations are intransigent dictatorships. Turkey, a close US ally and self described democracy, was by far the worst offender, holding 78 journalists in jail.

Ethiopia, often cited as a rare African political success story, leads that continent in the count of reporters and editors imprisoned. China, in a grim warning to those with panglossian, expectations for freedom of expression in Hong Kong later this year, has at least 16 journalists in jail, most of whom have been there for almost 10 years.

There is a facile argument that press freedom as we conceive it is a tradition peculiar to what we narrowly call the West, or even to those political cultures rooted in the legal traditions of the British Isles.

But a new generation of reporters in the emerging democracies of Asia, Africa and Latin America look to the journalism of North America and Western Europe as a model: not for its content, necessarily, which they often (correctly) consider parochial or superficial, but for its genuine independence.

In 1948, the signatories to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights asserted that all citizens of UN memberstates are free "to seek, receive and impart information through any media, and regardless of frontiers". With the convergence a half century later of two global revolutions - democratisation and instantaneous telecommunications - many people are claiming that right for the first time.

Though jailings and violence are a price some are willing to pay, their quest will not easily succeed without international support.