(WPFC/IFEX) – The following is a 28 April 2000 statement by the Coordinating Committee of Press Freedom Organizations, of which WPFC is a member: COMMITTEE TO PROTECT JOURNALISTS COMMONWEALTH PRESS UNION INTER AMERICAN PRESS ASSOCIATION INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF BROADCASTING INTERNATIONAL FEDERATION OF THE PERIODICAL PRESS INTERNATIONAL PRESS INSTITUTE NORTH AMERICAN BROADCASTERS ASSOCIATION WORLD ASSOCIATION OF […]
(WPFC/IFEX) – The following is a 28 April 2000 statement by the Coordinating Committee of Press Freedom Organizations, of which WPFC is a member:
COMMITTEE TO PROTECT JOURNALISTS
COMMONWEALTH PRESS UNION
INTER AMERICAN PRESS ASSOCIATION
INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF BROADCASTING
INTERNATIONAL FEDERATION OF THE PERIODICAL PRESS
INTERNATIONAL PRESS INSTITUTE
NORTH AMERICAN BROADCASTERS ASSOCIATION
WORLD ASSOCIATION OF NEWSPAPERS
WORLD PRESS FREEDOM COMMITTEE
Press Freedom Leaders: Journalists Do Not Need Special ‘Protection’
The Coordinating Committee of Press Freedom Organizations, meeting in Boston April 28, 2000, expressed its continued strong opposition to proposals to “protect journalists.”
However well-intentioned such proposals may be, experience shows that they are inevitably prone to abuse in schemes to control journalists and their movements. Extensive research has demonstrated that when journalists are killed or wounded in conflicts or other tense situations, it is either deliberate, precisely because they have been identified as news personnel, or by accident.
This is a controversial issue with a long history. No special journalists’ cards, licenses, badges or symbols would have helped the journalists who became casualties in their work. Examples of “protection” arrangements, such as accompanied press pools formed by military authorities during the Gulf War, revealed themselves to be in fact control mechanisms.
Special symbols such as those suggested by the Media Freedom Representative of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe are liable to serve as targets or magnets for snipers or other parties to violent conflict who are opposed to news coverage of their activities.
The issuing of special symbols implies the creation of a system to decide who may or may not be considered a journalist. In effect, this would be a journalistsâ licensing system, with all the drawbacks that this entails.
Journalists bound for conflict zones should be given training or counseling in the common sense guidelines for reinforcing their safety. Appropriate hazard insurance should be provided for such journalists.
Governments should make it clear that those who target journalists may not expect to avoid punishment for their crimes.
But journalism is not an occupation without risk. Those who choose to cover conflict zones do so in the knowledge of the chances they take. War correspondents do not request or desire protection. They seek only to report as freely as possible.
28 April 2000
Boston, Mass.
