Brunei

Brunei Darussalam is an absolute monarchy of roughly 460,000 people in which Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah has been head of state since 1967 and Prime Minister since independence in 1984. He is identified by his own office as the country’s supreme executive authority, and Crown Prince Al-Muhtadee Billah serves as Senior Minister within the Prime Minister’s Office. The Legislative Council is an appointed body.

Brunei ranked 96th of 180 countries and territories in the 2026 RSF World Press Freedom Index with a score of 52.58, compared with 97th and 53.47 in 2025, a one-place rise in rank accompanied by a decline in the underlying score. It placed fourth among ASEAN’s eleven members, behind Timor-Leste, Thailand and Malaysia. RSF describes press freedom in the country as virtually non-existent and reports pervasive self-censorship.

The State Media Monitor maps three state-media organisations in Brunei:

• Radio Television Brunei, the national state broadcaster, classified State-Controlled (SC). It is a government department of the Prime Minister’s Office, with no separate legal personality, governing board or constituting statute. Its FY2025/26 appropriation was BND 40.94 million, and nine of its eleven senior posts are held in an acting capacity.
• Pelita Brunei, the official government newspaper, classified State-Controlled. First published on 15 February 1956, it appears three times a week and is distributed free. It is not a separate organisation but a division of the Information Department, which received BND 8.669 million for FY2025/26.
• Brunei Press Sdn. Bhd., publisher of the Borneo Bulletin and Media Permata, reclassified in 2026 from State-Controlled to Captured Private (CaPr). It is a privately incorporated subsidiary of QAF Brunei, the royal family’s investment vehicle, which SMM’s ownership research identifies with Prince Mohamed Bolkiah, the Sultan’s brother. He served as Foreign Minister from independence in 1984 until 2015; the Sultan then held the portfolio until June 2026, when Prince Abdul Mateen was appointed Foreign Minister.

Brunei’s state media are unusual for the absence of any institutional buffer between government and newsroom. RTB is a department; Pelita Brunei is a division within a department; neither is a corporation, a statutory body or a company. Neither is a separately incorporated state-media enterprise, and neither has an autonomous governing board, separate legal personality or dedicated constituting statute establishing a public-service remit. No appointment procedure applies distinct from ordinary civil service administration.

This contrasts with many of the South Asian organisations mapped in the previous SMM cycle, where statutory corporations, governing boards or dedicated media laws provided at least a formal institutional layer between the outlet and the executive, even where those protections proved weak, unimplemented or vulnerable to political intervention.

RTB and Pelita Brunei also share an institutional history. The government’s information and broadcasting functions were merged on 1 January 1962 as the Broadcasting and Information Department, separated in 1975, recombined in December 1985 and transferred to the Prime Minister’s Office in October 1986. On 1 March 1991 they were separated again into the Information Department and Radio Television Brunei, both remaining within the Prime Minister’s Office.

Control operates through different mechanisms for state and private titles, and the legal asymmetry is instructive. For licensed broadcasting, the Broadcasting Act gives the responsible minister extensive powers over programme material and broadcasting services, including powers to issue directions and require public-service programming. RTB itself sits still closer to government because it is directly constituted as a department of the Prime Minister’s Office. The Newspapers Act imposes annual permits on private newspapers and gives the government wide discretion over their renewal, suspension and revocation. It expressly excludes publications issued by or under the authority of the government or a public body from its definition of a newspaper. Pelita Brunei therefore sits outside the permit regime applied to private newspapers precisely because it is an official government publication.

The Sedition Act, which criminalises publication that lowers the status or prerogatives of the Sultan, applies across the board. Brunei’s media market is not a formal monopoly. Kristal FM operates as a private commercial radio station, while the Borneo Bulletin and Media Permata are privately published. The leading private newspaper publisher, Brunei Press, is nevertheless controlled through a private business group linked to the ruling family. The separate English-language daily The Brunei Times, owned by Brunei Times PLC and regarded as testing some of the limits of the country’s press environment, ceased publication abruptly in 2016.

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