(WPFC/IFEX) – The following is a 23 December 2005 WPFC letter to Catalan authorities: December 23, 2005 His Excellency Pasqual Magarall i Mira President Generalitat of Catalonia Plaça de Sant Jaume, 4 (Palau de la Generalitat) 08002 Barcelona, Spain His Excellency Ernest Benach Chairman Parliament of Catalonia Parc de la Ciutadella, s/n 08003 Barcelona, Spain […]
(WPFC/IFEX) – The following is a 23 December 2005 WPFC letter to Catalan authorities:
December 23, 2005
His Excellency Pasqual Magarall i Mira
President
Generalitat of Catalonia
Plaça de Sant Jaume, 4 (Palau de la Generalitat)
08002 Barcelona, Spain
His Excellency Ernest Benach
Chairman
Parliament of Catalonia
Parc de la Ciutadella, s/n
08003 Barcelona, Spain
Your Excellencies:
On behalf of the World Press Freedom Committee, an organization representing 45 press freedom groups in six continents, I wish to express my consternation regarding the “report” by the Catalan Audiovisual Committee (CAC) [Consejo Audiovisual de Cataluña] in which, under the guise of an alleged moral authority, it uses an arbitrary mandate in an attempt to censor and silence the opinions of a whole radio network.
CAC – a censoring entity established in September by the Regional Parliament of Catalonia in order to detect “untruthful information” – had already recommended, a day after its inception, to revoke the broadcasting license of the COPE network for “exceeding the limits of freedom of speech.” On December 20, the CAC report accused the network of failing to fulfill “its prerequisites of constitutional veracity.”
Further, this entity – unique in Western Europe and the European Union, which offers perhaps the world’s most exemplary press freedom environment – concluded that COPE fails to meet its journalistic and editorial duties, calling its opinions “most grave accusations,” “insulting” and “public humiliations.”
Regardless of the veracity or “insulting” intentions of the network’s speech, we find it unjustifiable that a state entity, bestowed with censoring powers typical of painful autocratic regimes of the past, be the arbiter of the behavior of a media outlet. COPE or any other media outlet in Spain has every right to express their opinions in an atmosphere of liberty enshrined in the Spanish Constitution.
The mere existence of CAC is in direct contradiction with the democratic and freedom of expression norms adopted by the European Union, the European Court of Human Rights and the vast majority of the world’s democracies. In fact, we have not seen anything similar to this since the Franco dictatorship’s censoring committees, which, with extraordinary zeal, controlled the country’s media for almost 40 years.
CAC is not a court of justice but a political body controlled by the ruling nationalist majority of the Catalonian Parliament. As such, it is neither independent of political considerations nor equipped with the procedural mechanisms required to offer an accused party a fair trial when charged. It just happens that COPE’s opinions are in opposition to the political goals of the parliamentary majority. The political antagonism of both entities, in a true democracy, should not bear any relevance. What we find extremely grave is the fact that a government – whether it is national, regional or local – abuses the power emanating from its constituents in order to silence the voices that such a government finds strident or uncomfortable.
It is unacceptable that a censoring organ should receive the blessings of a democratic parliament in order to outright silence a media outlet.
Therefore, I urge the Catalan judicial power to dismiss the CAC calls to revoke COPE’s license, and the Catalan Parliament and the Generalitat to take the appropriate measures in order to dismantle CAC, thus adhering to international norms of freedom of expression and of the press.
Respectfully,
E. Markham Bench
Executive Director
World Press Freedom Committee
(http://www.wpfc.org)
