SAFEGUARDING JOURNALISTS
by Keith Hindell, UNA London & South-East Region

VIOLENCE AGAINST JOURNALISTS AND MEDIA WORKERS IS INCREASING.17 were killed in the first six weeks of 2009. Over the past 12 years, nearly 1,200 journalists have been killed in the line of duty, only a quarter of them in combat zones.

Most journalists who are killed are deliberately murdered in countries or areas supposedly at peace. Moreover, hardly any of those crimes are actually brought to trial. There is a growing culture of impunity worldwide and in many countries it’s becoming the accepted practice - if you are some kind of political, economic or drug boss - to murder your critics.

I am not trying to imply a media worker’s life is worth more than anyone else’s, but we need to draw attention to the fact that reporters, cameramen, editors – and their support staff - are essential cogs in any decent society. They show society a picture of itself, warts and all. They provide the means for citizens to scrutinise those with power - official power or otherwise.

If you silence the media, you paralyse freedom of expression, and even freedom of thought.

Remember Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, a critic of Russian policy in Chechnya? A month before she was murdered in 2006, she wrote “we are hurtling back into a Soviet abyss - an information vacuum that spells death from our own ignorance ”. UNESCO – the UN body tasked with protecting freedom of expression and information – is alarmed by this trend. Last year, it urged member states to prosecute those who attacked journalists and asked its Director-General to report on progress. For the last three years the UNESCO Director General has been alerting the international community every time a media person is assassinated.

The UN Security Council has also highlighted this issue. Resolution1738, passed in 2006, highlights the importance of protecting media personnel in conflict zones, saying that they are protected by the Third Geneva Convention and its additional protocol of 1977.

But war zones are only a quarter of the problem. In January this year, Lasantha Wickramatungr, editor of the Sunday Leader newspaper in Sri Lanka, was murdered by gunmen while driving to work. He wasn’t in the war zone in the north of Sri Lanka. He wasn’t killed by an accident of war. He was a critic of the Sri Lankan government’s conduct of the civil war but he was far from the fighting.

Three days before Wickrematunge was assassinated he wrote “It will be the government that kills me. Murder has become the primary tool whereby the state seeks to control the organs of liberty”. He was the sixteenth journalist killed in Sri Lanka during the past three years. And the situation is just as bad, if not worse, in Colombia, Mexico, Russia and Pakistan.

That’s why individuals, NGOs and governments around the world should support UNESCO’s fight to protect media workers. Freedom of expression and information are fundamental human rights and governments should do much more to ensure the protection of media personnel, and to pursue the perpetrators of such crimes. In a nutshell: “Don’t shoot the messenger”.