Published on 15 September 2003
11 December 2009 - Call to Action to protect environmental journalists
2 October 2008 - Open letter to Margaret Chan, WHO director, about the contaminated milk powder scandal
16 September 2008 - UN urged to stop discriminating against Taiwanese journalists
"Excluding a press freedom organisation from the WSIS is a serious step fraught with consequences," Reporters Without Borders secretary-general Robert Ménard said after the organisation was notified of the ban by WSIS executive director Pierre Gagné.
"How can the UN still expect to maintain the least credibility in the light of this kind of decision, which contravenes the most basic principles of freedom of expression," Ménard added.
At the request of regimes that are the worst press freedom violators, Reporters Without Borders was suspended from the UN commission on human rights after it energetically protested the choice of a Libyan representative to be the commission’s chairperson.
The coming WSIS is a key event for freedom of expression. Several human rights organisations have already voiced fears about the draft declaration that could be adopted by UN member states in December. Dictatorships and other repressive regimes intend to use this summit to subject information on the Internet to measures of control and censorship. The documents being drafted would, in particular, make online press freedom dependent on "each country’s legislation."
Against this backdrop, banning a press freedom organisation from attending the WSIS is likely to alarm those that defend human rights and freedom of expression. The UN human rights farce continues.
Scores of Chinese journalists, bloggers and human rights activists were arrested, put under house arrested or expelled from Beijing before and during the Olympic Games. The Games have now finished and we call for their release !
