El Financiero newspaper reports that Costa Rica’s Guild of Journalists (Colper) and the Institute for Press and Freedom of Expression (IPLEX) have joined with the paper in a suit against the Ministry of Labor for refusing to release data about firms that fail to comply with minimum wage laws.
El Salvador's President Mauricio Funes sent back to the Legislative Assembly a bill that would create a public information access law, asking for various modifications and clarifications, reported El Faro.
Freedom of expression activists spoke out against the island’s Legislative Assembly for trying to prosecute Brent Fuller, a journalist for the Caymanian Compass, for an article criticizing a plan to review the country’s information access laws in closed-door committee hearings.
Considering the way WikiLeaks and its publishing of secret diplomatic cables and classified documents related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have prompted debates about the public's right to know and transparency in government, the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas has decided to highlight information access laws throughout Latin America.
In recent days Brazil has seen various demonstrations in support of WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange. The Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism (ABRAJI) issued a statement supporting the publication of documents from a cache of 250,000 secret diplomatic cables, arguing that the information is in the public's interest.
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva harshly criticized the arrest of Julian Assange, founder of the WikiLeaks website that has been releasing a cache of 250,000 secret diplomatic cables. According to Terra, the president if the first international leader to speak out against the arrest of Assange, who was wanted on rape charges in Sweden. “The guy was only publishing that which he read. And if he read it, it's because someone else wrote it. The blame doesn't belong to who released it, the blame is with who wrote it," Lula said, as quoted by Dow Jones newswire. "So, WikiLeaks, my solidarity for disclosing
Uruguay's president, José Mujica, said he is tired of being asked about the possibility of a potential law regulating the press. In an interivew published by the Argentine newspaper La Nación, the president said he had not received any proposals for such a law, and that if he did, he would throw them in the trash.
After 17 months of debate, the Legislative Assembly in El Salvador approved a law requiring state institutions to make information available to the public, reported El Faro. The law still must be signed by President Mauricio Funes.
The Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Catalina Botero, said access to public information in Brazil is an important tool for understanding what happened during the military dictatorship (1964-1985). She argued that the release of such documents, however, cannot be accompanied by any type of rules on the use of the documents by journalists or other members of the public. "Media outlets have the responsibility to manage news, but beyond guaranteeing access, the law cannot establish restrictions on the use of information,” she said.
The Superior Military Court (STM) has given the Folha de S. Paulo newspaper access to documents on President-elect Dilma Rousseff’s arrest and imprisonment during the dictatorship (1964-1985), Folha reports. Carlos Alberto Soares, the court’s top justice, had previously denied the paper access to the information, saying he was attempting to prevent it from being used for political purposes during the presidential election campaign.
The city outskirts, or peripheries, comprise a third of the Brazilian population. Because these communities traditionally are ignored by mainstream media – except in matters where stereotypes dominate – a citizen journalism project created by the Brazilian journalist Bruno Garcez, 38 years old, is aimed at covering these neighborhoods in a more complete and accurate way. With a fellowship from the Knight Foundation, offered by the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ), Bruno took a year off from his position as a Washington correspondent for BBC Brasil to be able to train citizen journalists in the poor co
The National Archive of Brazil’s Revealed Memories project (Memórias Reveladas) – created to facilitate the release of dictatorship-era documents (1964-1985) – is now at the center of a debate between journalists and the authorities after its refusal to release documents during the election, O Globo reports. The document project justified its decision by claiming “journalists were misusing documents and seeking data about candidates involved in the electoral campaign.”