Thirteen media outlets, press associations and groups dedicated to freedom of expression in Latin America and the Caribbean have joined a global call for better protections for access to information and media freedom for future generations.
During the Summit for the Future, which takes place in September in New York, 193 UN Member States will sign the “Pact for the Future,” a document of 58-actions focused on commitments to international cooperation on pressing issues facing the world.
The Global Forum for Media Development (GFMD), a community of media development and journalism support organizations, and 110 co-signers have published a petition to address five of these actions that concern media and journalism.
“Given both the severity of challenges facing media and journalists around the world, which in many contexts nears an extinction-level event, and the utmost importance of access to information and freedom of expression in empowering people to address shared needs, we call on the UN and Member States to further strengthen their commitments,” the GFMD-led petition says.
According to the UN, “the Summit is a high-level event, bringing world leaders together to forge a new international consensus on how we deliver a better present and safeguard the future.”
The Pact for the Future lays out the path for achieving a better world for future generations, emphasizing sustainable development, fighting poverty and war, working for gender equality and equal access to justice, enhancing efforts to combat climate change, and more. The document is still being negotiated and has undergone two revisions so far.
The petition from media advocates requests the inclusion of language concerning journalist safety, viability of public media and reliance of an autonomous information ecosystem. It emphasizes that these are “fundamental for advancing the entirety of the Sustainable Development Goals.”
It also pushes for the protection of media freedom and public-interest journalism, access to information, and “independent, free and pluralistic media.”
The National Association of Journalists of Peru (ANP) is one of the organizations from Latin America that has joined the GFMD petition to highlight information freedoms.
Zuliana Lainez, ANP president, told LatAm Journalism Review (LJR) it’s necessary to go beyond the “nice phrase” that “without press freedom there is no democracy.” She wants more serious commitments from States.
Lainez stressed that there is an “absolute regression” throughout the world regarding the right to access information.
“Increasingly, the premise that all State information is presumed public is being lost,” said Lainez, who added that in Peru and other countries in the region there have been cases in which public information is not only being denied, but the journalists who ask for it are being sued for doing so.
“If we are going to talk about guaranteeing the future, guaranteeing democracy, guaranteeing rights and freedoms […] the States have to assume the weight of guaranteeing these rights, such as the exercise of information freedoms, in an essential way,” Lainez said.
The Institute of Press and Freedom of Expression of Costa Rica (IPLEX) is another of the organizations in the region that signed the petition to “recognize the importance of independent and pluralistic media as actors of control, surveillance of public power and the fight against corruption.” That’s according to Raúl Silesky Jiménez, IPLEX president.
Silesky told LJR this is especially important for a region like Latin America where democracy faces threats that require actions to strengthen it.
Although the Pact for the Future is not a binding document, organizations such as Human Rights Watch consider it a “critical opportunity to affirm a vision of human rights that can help bridge some of the sharp divisions between governments on these and other issues.”
Lainez said that, even though it’s not binding, the importance of the Pact lies in the fact that it was born from the initiative of the States themselves, but that it also has the consensus of civil society organizations. “It is achieving a fairly horizontal consensus,” she said.
“This document is important to continue insisting and fighting for freedoms,” Silesky Jiménez said.
