Two independent United Nations (UN) human right experts, yesterday urged greater protection for media professionals, citing high number of attacks, including arbitrary arrests, torture and killings, as well as sexual violence against female journalists.
“Attacks against journalists are attacks against democracy,” the special rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression, Frank La Rue, and the special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, Christof Heyns, in a joint news release stressed.
Presenting their respective reports to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, they urged governments, the international community, as well as journalists and media organisations to act decisively to protect the lives of journalists and media freedom.
La Ru said, “The continuing repression of journalists and media freedom worldwide, aimed at suppressing information deemed ‘inconvenient,’ and increasing restrictions placed on journalists who disseminate information through the internet is unacceptable.
“States continue to utilise criminal laws on defamation, national security and counterterrorism to suppress dissent and criticism, including on government policies, human rights violations and allegations of corruption,” he noted, adding that, “such ‘judicial harassment’ generates a climate of fear and encourages self-censorship.”
Mr. Heyns added that impunity is a major, if not the main, cause of the high number of journalists killed every year.
“Countries where the highest numbers of journalists are killed are also, almost without exception, those with the highest levels of impunity.”
“It is hard to imagine a world without journalists. Without their work, humanity would be reduced to silence, and yet a large number are killed every year with almost total impunity,” he added, noting that journalists are among the persons who receive the most death threats.
In a related development, head of the United Nations agency tasked with defending press freedom has called for Syrian authorities to probe the recent deaths of five journalists killed during shelling, and to take steps to ensure the safety of media workers in the country.
“I call on the Syrian authorities to fully investigate the circumstances of their deaths,” director-general of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), Irina Bokova, said in a news release, in which she also condemned the killings.