Report: Governments abuse accreditation of media
A new report from Europe takes aim at an insidious form of state censorship: the misuse of accreditation to journalists. The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) has issued the report through its media freedom office. The report’s purpose is to remind the 56 OSCE states that open and fair accreditation of journalists is part of their commitment to press freedom. The report is also a response to governments that have used accreditation to keep out independent voices and punish journalists who provide unfavourable coverage. One of the events that influenced the report was the May 2005 unrest in Andijan, Uzbekistan, where troops shot and killed an unknown number of protesters. In the weeks and months afterward, President Islam Karimov’s government revoked visas and accreditation of journalists who had tried to cover the crisis independently. The BBC was among the foreign outlets pushed out of the country afterward. Other states singled out in the report include Belarus, Russia, Turkmenistan, and the United States. The latter country in recent years has been enforcing a law requiring journalists to apply for an ‘I-Visa’ from the Homeland Security Department-and some have bee expelled for not having one. OSCE says the permit has an ‘unnecessary permissive character,’ writes International Journalists Network.
The OSCE report concludes the report with following recommendations for
of journalists by adopting procedures that enable journalists to work in the host
country, including the timely issue of visas. Governments should abolish
regulations that pose a required further layer of permission to media
professionals
Further, the threat of revocation of the accreditation for an event should not be
used as the means to control the content of critical reporting.
Further, the threat of revocation of the accreditation for an event should not be
used as the means to control the content of critical reporting.
has a permissive nature over the issuance of accreditation should be re-
examined in order to maintain pluralism in the press corp.
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