About IFEX:

News by region:

IFEX Campaigns and Advocacy:

IFEX Email Products:

Opportunities and assistance:

Alert

Coalition on press freedom calls for information summit to abandon Tunisia

(WAN/IFEX) - The following is a WAN press release:

Geneva, Switzerland, 9 December 2003

Coalition on Press Freedom Calls for Information Summit to Abandon Tunisia

A global coalition of free press organisations has called on the World Summit on the Information Society to move its 2005 meeting from Tunisia because the country does not respect free speech and press freedom.

The Coordinating Committee of Press Freedom Organisations, meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, on the eve of the WSIS, said a second, follow-up meeting in 2005 in Tunis "should be transferred to a country known to respect press freedom, or cancelled altogether."

"The Tunisian press is censored, journalists are jailed along with hundreds of other political prisoners, and organisation of the Tunis summit has been assigned to a military general alleged to be responsible for the torture of political prisoners," the Committee said in a resolution.

The members of the Coordinating Committee which signed the resolutions are the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Inter American Press Association, the International Association of Broadcasting, the International Federation of the Periodical Press, the International Press Institute, the North American Broadcasters Association, the World Association of Newspapers and the World Press Freedom Committee.

Read the full resolution at:
http://www.wan-press.org/article3270.html

The Coordinating Committee also applauded the inclusion of Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the draft Declaration of Principles and Plan of Action prepared for the WSIS, which would reaffirm the right to freedom of expression on the Internet. But the committee lamented that the text does not more strongly call for implementation of Article 19 "in a world where a large number of governments continue to repress the print, broadcast and Internet press."

Read the resolution at:
http://www.wan-press.org/article3271.html

The Paris-based WAN, which hosted the meeting of the Coordinating Committee, is the global organisation for the newspaper industry. It represents 18,000 newspapers; its membership includes 72 national newspaper associations, individual newspaper executives in 100 countries, 13 news agencies and nine regional and world-wide press groups.