Brazil’s Senate president, José Sarney, blocked an attempt to censure Senator Robert Requião, who forcefully took a journalists tape recorder, erased what was on it, and threatened to hit the media worker during an April interview, G1 reports.
A bill in Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies would require media companies to provide life and disability insurance for journalists working in dangerous areas, Agência Câmara reports.
Peru’s Congress has passed a bill replacing prison time for defamation and libel offenses with fines and community service, Perú.com reports. The change was passed June 21, but it still needs the president’s signature to become law.
The president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, has announced that Congress will consider a new media regulation law that will help fight "ink assassins," as he refers to opposition journalists, and that will be the "best legacy" of his administration, reported Fundamedios.
The Supreme Court of Peru sent a bill to Congress that would imprison those who distribute recordings of private conversations obtained by illegal telephone wiretaps, Perú21 reports. Freedom of expression groups said the bill was an attempt to restrict press freedom and weaken the tools used to watchdog the authorities, Diario Ya explains.
Costa Rica's Congress voted to table a proposed freedom of expression and the press law that would have updated the 1902 press law, and whose approval had been pending for several years, reported the radio station Monumental.
The Commission on Planning, Economic Policy and Finance of the House of Deputies in Bolivia announced that it would include the public's recommendations in a proposed telecommunications that has been criticized by press freedom organizations for certain aspects that limit freedom of information, reported Los Tiempos.
The legislature for the Mexican border state of Chihuahua, which recently has become one of the most violent regions in the country because of drug trafficking, has passed a law protecting journalistic secrets, the first such legislation in Mexico, reported El Diario de Ciudad Juárez.
Some scholars link the presence of a freedom of information law in a county to its level of social and economic development. After all, the first country to pass such a law was Sweden, a nation that charts highly on human development indices. The second was Finland, another place considered among the best in the world to live. The United States was the third country to pass a law guaranteeing access to public information.
The Brazilian government said it will no longer wade into the fight over adding a permanent secrecy provision to the information access law that is pending in Congress, Correio Braziliense and Folha de S. Paulo report. The amendment would allow top-secret documents to remain classified indefinitely.
At the II National Meeting of Progressive Bloggers, held June 17-19 in Brasília, Brazilian ex-president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva criticized the press and thanked bloggers for their support during the electoral campaign that brought Dilma Rousseff to the presidency, according to Agência Estado.
Just as journalistic organizations in Ecuador and Paraguay are complaining about the use of laws against the press aimed at silencing journalistis, the Inter American Press Association (IAPA) released a statement expressing concern about the "deterioration of freedom of expression and press freedom on the American continent," reported La Prensa.