(RSF/IFEX) – In a letter to Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Tang Jiaxuan, RSF protested the arrest and deportation of Swiss photographer Jean Marie Jolidon, while he was in Beijing airport’s international transit area. “Four days before the IOC’s [International Olympic Committee] decision as to the attribution of the 2008 Olympics Games, the Chinese government […]
(RSF/IFEX) – In a letter to Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Tang Jiaxuan, RSF protested the arrest and deportation of Swiss photographer Jean Marie Jolidon, while he was in Beijing airport’s international transit area. “Four days before the IOC’s [International Olympic Committee] decision as to the attribution of the 2008 Olympics Games, the Chinese government shows, once again, that it is not ready to respect the rights of foreign journalists to work freely,” said RSF Secretary-General Robert Ménard. The organisation asked the minister to lift restrictions on foreign journalists working in China and Tibet.
According to the information obtained by RSF, Jolidon, photographer and reporter working for the Swiss press and photo agency Terra Productions, his wife and his ten-year old child were arrested on 3 July 2001 by Chinese police in Beijing airport’s transit area. The reporter and his family were about to board a plane for Ulan Batur, the capital of Mongolia. Eight policemen took him to an airport detention centre, where he was interrogated with his family for eight hours. They were expelled the same day to Switzerland. The authorities claimed that they did not have visas to enter China and that they were not authorised to be in the transit area. Yet, several other passengers in the same situation were able to go to Mongolia.
The Chinese consulate in Switzerland refused to grant visas to the journalist and his family. Jolidon has already made many photographic reports on Tibet and the Dalai Lama. He is also one of the authors of the programme titled “Tibet, in Milarepa’s Footsteps”. The reporter went to Mongolia to do a report for a Swiss adventure magazine.
The Chinese authorities only rarely grant press visas to foreign reporters wishing to work in Tibet or Xinjiang. They are forced to use tourist visas. Recently, a foreign correspondent declared “it is impossible for foreign journalists to work freely in China.” But in its report dated May 2001, the IOC Evaluation Commission stated that “there will be no restrictions on media reporting and the movement of journalists up to and during the Olympics.” According to a journalist based in Beijing, it is a promise that the government “will have difficulty keeping.”
