por Federica Cherubini
3 May is World Press Freedom Day, established as such by the UN General Assembly in 1993.
The day is celebrated worldwide by different international organizations such the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and here, the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA).
"Every year, May 3rd is a date which celebrates the fundamental principles of press freedom; to evaluate press freedom around the world, to defend the media from attacks on their independence and to pay tribute to journalists who have lost their lives in the exercise of their profession", announces UNESCO's website. UNESCO has organized a conference at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. on Monday 2 and Tuesday 3 with a focus on how the Internet and digital platforms are contributing to freedom of expression, democratic governance and sustainable development across the globe.
Mashable provides the livestream of the conference here.
WAN-IFRA's theme of this year is the importance of a free press for democracy, whether emerging or well established.
"A free press is at the very core of the right to free expression, providing a frontline defence for safeguarding access to knowledge and information as defined in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
A free press provides a window through which all other abuses of fundamental rights can be revealed.
It affirms that to criticise, hold to account and call to justice those in power is the right of the many and not the few.
Put simply, freedom of expression is the right that underpins all rights", writes Alison Meston, WAN-IFRA's Deputy Director Press Freedom and Media Development, on the World Press Freedom Day site.
Member associations were encouraged to participate to the initiative and endorsing the campaign publishing a white space on the front page of their newspapers or running advertisements.
Journalists, publishers and public figures, like Peter Englund, the Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy for the Nobel Prize for Literature and Trevor Ncube, Executive Chairman of the Zimbabwe Independent and The Standard, have also written editorials to support the campaign.
World Editors Forum President Erik Bjerager spoke at a Press Freedom Congress organised by the Freedom for Journalists Platform, a coalition of 93 media organisations in Turkey, where a recent spate of journalist jailing has raised concerns.
WAN-IFRA also partnered with the Media Institute of Southern Africa, UNESCO and the Government of Namibia in a conference marking the 20th anniversary of the Declaration of Windhoek, a statement of principles calling for a free, independent and pluralistic media throughout the world.
According to the annual report from Freedom House - cited by the International Journalists' Network (IJNET) - the smallest proportion of the world's population in more than a decade - just one in six - had access to a free press in 2010.
Overall, the article reported, of the 196 countries rated by FH, 68 were rated as having a free press, 65 were rated as having a partly free press and 63 were rated not free.
Unfortunately some countries went in a negative direction in 2010, being moved down a class, such as Honduras and Mexico, which was revealed to be the most deadly place for journalists, together with Pakistan.
The new digital era has seen an increasing role of the Internet, blogs and social media as an arm to fight censorship and press freedom intimations. While the national traditional state media were silenced, the news of the recent riots in the Arab World spread all over through Twitter and social media.
However authoritarian regimes increased their control also over these new media.
"Many of the oppressors' tactics show an increasing sophistication, from the state-supported email in China designed to take over journalists' personal computers, to the carefully timed cyber-attacks on news websites in Belarus", wrote Danny O'Brien on Committee to Protect Journalists' website, who has examined the 10 prevailing tactics of online oppression worldwide and the countries that have taken the lead in their use.
Censorship tactics include web blocking, used with particular effectiveness by Iran, denial of access, which is what Cuba does, letting a very small part of the population accessing to the Internet at home, while the vast majority required to use state-controlled access points with identity checks, heavy surveillance and restriction on access to non-Cuban sites.
The article also cited the arbitrary detention of bloggers, carried out by Syria or the state cybercrime committed by Tunisia under Ben Ali. The Tunisian Internet Agency redirected Tunisian users to fake, government-created log-in pages for Google, Yahoo and Facebook, stealing usernames and passwords from these pages and using these login data to delete material reported during the riots by online journalists for example, as the CPJ article reported.
"Silence kills democracy... But a free press talks".
# Sources: UNESCO, Mashable, WAN-IFRA, IJNET, CPJ
publicado no Editors Weblog
0 comentários:
Postar um comentário