KATHMANDU: At least two enemies of media freedom will share the spotlight at this week’s United Nations meeting dedicated to making the information age accessible to all people of the world. Nepal’s King Gyanendra will attend the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in the Capital Tunisia at the invitation of President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali.
The monarch left Kathmandu on Friday just as the Supreme Court ruled against challenges to a media ordinance that tightens restrictions on journalists already squeezed by the state following the king’s takeover of the government Feb. 1. Protests soon followed the court’s decision, including an hour-long sit-in by 500 lawyers at the Supreme Court on Sunday. “Who are these people who are taking away the rights given us by parliament?” asked Nepal Bar Association President Shambhu Thapa, reported ‘The Kathmandu Post’.
Freedom of expression advocates have denounced the decision to name Tunisia as host of part two of the summit since 2003, when the inaugural meeting took place in Geneva. Ben Ali’s government has jailed journalists critical of its policies and actively censors the Internet. On Friday, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) slammed the detention of journalists Hamadi Jebali and Mohamed Abbou. Jebali was first arrested in 1991 for publishing an article demanding the abolition of military tribunals in the North African nation.
On April 28, Abbou was sentenced to three and a half years in prison for writing an Internet article posted on the banned Tunisian Internet site, Tunisnews, that compared torture in Tunisia’s prisons to conditions in Iraq’s infamous Abu Ghraib jail. “The imprisonment of both Jebali and Abbou fly in the face of the most basic standards for freedom of expression and the press and is symptomatic of a broader climate of government repression of the media in Tunisia,” said CPJ President Ann Cooper in a news release.
According to the WSIS Declaration of Principles, the aim of the conference is to help build a world where information will assist all people to “achieve their full potential” and “improve their quality of life”. “We reaffirm our commitment to the principles of freedom of the press and freedom of information, as well as those of the independence, pluralism and diversity of media, which are essential to the Information Society,” adds the document. Those words will ring hollow if Nepal’s monarch shines in the international media spotlight in the Tunisian capital Tunis, say activists here.
“King Gyanendra has shown open contempt for the free press. His attendance at the information summit should be read as a cynical attempt at window dressing,” Tejshree Thapa, South Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch, told IPS.
The WSIS gives the monarch “another opportunity to lie to the world”, added the president of the Federation of Nepalese Journalists (FNJ) Bishnu Nisthuri.
According to Abi Wright, CPJ Asia programme coordinator, “it is ironic that King Gyanendra would attend a conference on the free flow of information overseas, while at home, he secretly enacted one of the most restrictive media laws in the region, and has effectively outlawed any criticism of his government”. The prime minister of Nepal’s powerful southern neighbour India, Manmohan Singh, told King Gyanendra at a meeting last week of South Asian leaders that he should take concrete steps to return democracy “as early as possible”. But the UN says there is room at the WSIS for King Gyanendra.
“I think we at ITU (the International Telecommunication Union) would want to confirm that WSIS is indeed being held in a spirit of promoting access to information to all the world’s people. We would interpret the presence of leading figures from governments as a positive indication of their growing support for this principle,” Sarah Parkes, chief of media relations and public information at the UN agency, told IPS in an email interview.
Last week, the Association of Tunisian Journalists (ATJ) called on the Tunisian government to guarantee free access to the Internet for all journalists. It also set up a hotline to provide advice and assistance to foreign journalists who will participate in the WSIS.
“The move sends a powerful signal that Tunisian journalists are lining up to support the global consensus that the information era is about free access to information, an end to censorship and support for media pluralism,” said Aidan White, general secretary of the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), parent body of the ATJ. In September, Ben Ali’s government barred the newly formed, independent Syndicate of Tunisian Journalists from holding its inaugural annual congress. Its president, Lotfi Haji, is one of many journalists and activists, including Jebali, now refusing to eat in protest of the government’s repression.—Dawn/IPS News Service
