The International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists (IDEI), on Nov. 2, was marked by events all over the world. At the United Nations headquarters in New York City, a panel discussion concluded that it is time for the international community to take more concrete actions to protect journalists and prosecute those who commit crimes against them.
The panel “Ending Impunity for Crimes against Journalists: Putting Resolutions into Practice” was co-organized by UNESCO and permanent missions of Greece and Lithuania to the UN. Greece was the country that proposed the creation of the IDEI, approved by the UN General Assembly in 2013.
"There is a momentum created by a series of initiatives by the international community, especially since the UN Action Plan for the Safety of Journalists spearheaded by UNESCO. There is much more awareness about this serious global problem and this is good. Now we need to put all the resolutions to work and the states need to engage more in concrete efforts to protect journalists," said professor Rosental Calmon Alves, founder and director of the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas and holder of the UNESCO Chair in Communication at the University of Texas at Austin.
Professor Alves chaired the panel discussion on Monday, during a busy day at the 70th General Assembly at the United Nations in New York City.
During the panel, Delphine Halgand, the Washington representative of the Paris-based organization Reporters Without Borders (RSF for its acronym in French) called on the United Nations (UN) to appoint a Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary General for the Safety of Journalists.
“Various resolutions have been adopted in the past decade by the Security Council, by the General Assembly, and these very important legal advances, these landmark legal advances, have not been translated into action, if we are to judge by the number of journalists killed every year, every week,” said Delphine Halgand. “The issue regarding the safety of journalists is not an absence of applicable law, but a lack of means of ensuring compliance.”
According to RSF, the Special Representative would monitor member states for compliance with their obligations under international law. “Only a Special Representative working closely with the UN Secretary-General will have the political weight, the capacity to act quickly, and the legitimacy to coordinate with all UN bodies to implement change,” Halgand said.
Other panelists and representatives quickly echoed Halgand’s call for specific measures to combat global impunity in cases of violence against journalists.
The calls were made ever more urgent by the Oct. 31 events in Bangladesh in which a publisher was killed and another publisher and two bloggers were brutally attacked. Faisal Arefin Dipan became the sixth media worker killed in Bangladesh this year, most of them secular bloggers, according to the International Federation of Journalists.
Earlier this year, blogger Avijit Roy and his wife, journalist Rafida Bonya Ahmed, were brutally attacked by suspected religious extremists armed with machetes. Roy’s blog, Muktomona (Free Mind), promoted “secular views, science and social issues,” according to BBC.com.
Rafida Bonya Ahmed survived the attack and was present at Monday’s panel to talk about her husband’s death and the situation of violence against journalists in Bangladesh. She called on the international community to create and revamp efforts to build safe houses for journalists and bloggers under threat.
“The situation is dire,” Amed said. “These bloody days are becoming a norm.”
Ahmed explained that following her husband’s murder, she was able to return to the United States, where the couple lived. After months at hospitals, recovering from the wounds from the machete attack, Ahmed took over and continued the work of her late husband on the blog Muktomona. Now, she is doing what she can to help journalists in her home country who are at risk.
To mark the IDEI, UNESCO released its report “World Trends in Freedom of Expression and Media Development: Special Digital Focus 2015,” which concentrates on four broad areas: countering online hate speech, protecting journalism sources in the digital age, fostering freedom online: the role of internet intermediaries and safety of journalists.
Professor Alves presented, on behalf of UNESCO, a summary of the chapter of the World Trends' report regarding Safety of Journalists. He pointed out that impunity remains the norm, as "less than 6% of killings of journalists have been resolved" during the period covered by the report (January 2015 to August 2015). Other highlights:
As part of the report, the Director-General of UNESCO regularly requests information from member states about “actions taken to prevent the impunity of those responsible for the killing of journalists and media workers,” according to the organization. The report noted a possible upward trend in voluntary response rates over the past two years, but also a continued trend of high impunity rates.
Latin American countries that responded included Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Paraguay and Venezuela. Peru was the only Latin American country surveyed that did not respond.
Highlighting efforts already being taken to end impunity in crimes against journalists, panel moderator Rosental Alves spoke also about massive online training courses for Latin American judges, created by the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, UNESCO and the Office of the Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).
Hundreds of Latin American judges have already benefited from those Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) offered by UNESCO and the Knight Center. After two courses for Mexicans (one at the national level, with support from the Supreme Court of Mexico, and the other at the local level, with support from the government of the state of Coahuila, another MOOC started on October 26, with more than 1,200 judges and operators of the judicial systems of all Latin American countries, expect Cuba.
Note from the editor: This story was originally published by the Knight Center’s blog Journalism in the Americas, the predecessor of LatAm Journalism Review.
