• by Farhana Haque Rahman (rome)
• Friday, February 05, 2016
• Inter Press Service

ROME, Feb 05 (IPS) - While our goal at Inter Press Service is to provide information – a precious global public good – we naturally applaud all efforts to foster and promote the safety of journalists, and so applaud UNESCO's international conference in Paris on Friday February 5, 2016 with media executives and member states to discuss just that.

Farhana Haque RahmanThe conference aims both to improve the safety of reporters and tackle ‘impunity for crimes' against media professionals.

Some 370 journalists were murdered between 2004 and 2013 "in direct retaliation for their work", according to a recent report by the Committee to Protect Journalists. The toll has sadly increased by another 230 in the past two years alone, according to the International Federation of Journalists.

One of IPS's own, Alla Hassan, was shot and killed while driving to work in Baghdad in 2006. When a journalist is killed, so is the story she or he was working on, and the broader story all news organizations are trying to tell is seriously wounded. IPS emphatically joins in the call for a way to enforce international law on the protection of journalists.

A first step is to pressure countries to submit updates on investigations into attacks against the media on their territory. Currently fewer than half are doing so. Eradicating impunity for such attacks is crucial for reducing their occurrence.

At stake is not only the basic human right of every individual not to be killed but a veritable ecosystem in which a plurality of voices can be represented in increasingly complex and globalized societies. Unsolved attacks cast a long shadow over what remains, potentially enforcing self-censorship, as some reporters on organized crime in Mexico complain.

To be sure, reporters will always resist. Consider Ruqia Hassan, who was executed by ISIS for reporting on militia attacks in her native Raqqa. She knew the threat but preferred it to the humiliation of silence.

In a fast-moving world, attacks on media are taking on new forms. Reporters now must be concerned about their digital safety, for example. And Hassan represents a new breed of independent citizen journalists. While such cases stretch beyond the traditional purview of professional media organizations, we know there is a common cause and that there is great need for progress. So today our hearts are in Paris.

© Inter Press Service (2016) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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