(IAPA/IFEX) – On 22 July 1998, IAPA, through its Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information, protested the ouster of foreign news correspondents from the Cuban national legislature and called on President Fidel Castro to show respect for journalists in carrying out their work. Castro had expelled journalists representing international news media from the […]
(IAPA/IFEX) – On 22 July 1998, IAPA, through its Committee on Freedom of the
Press and Information, protested the ouster of foreign news correspondents
from the Cuban national legislature and called on President Fidel Castro to
show respect for journalists in carrying out their work.
Castro had expelled journalists representing international news media from
the National Assembly on Tuesday, 21 July 1998, after they went there to
cover the opening of the
new congressional session. He told them to leave, it was reported, so he
could “speak with complete freedom.”
The chairman of IAPA’s Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information,
Danilo Arbilla, declared that “nobody can restrict the right of people to
receive and transmit news.”
“This attitude of the Cuban government amounts to a clear act of censorship
and denial of universal rights of information and is a violation of press
freedom”, added Arbilla, editor of the Montevideo, Uruguay, news magazine
“Búsqueda.”
Castro’s action, he said, was also a violation of the Declaration of
Chapultepec setting out the principles for freedom of expression, which
states that “the authorities must be compelled by law to make available in a
timely and reasonable manner the information generated by the public
sector.”
The IAPA-sponsored Declaration, adopted at a hemisphere conference in Mexico
City in 1994, also stipulates that “the media and journalists should
neither be discriminated against nor favored because of what they write or
say.”
IAPA is due to hold a new hemisphere conference in San José, Costa Rica,
16-18 August 1998, in which lawyers, judges, political leaders, and
newspapers editors and publishers will discuss the Declaration in the
context of press freedom and democracy.
