The Importance of Journalistic Freedom

Jakarta Globe, The Southeast Asian Press Alliance, May 03, 2010

World Press Freedom Day, May 3, was first celebrated in 1993, established as a day not only to acknowledge the importance of free, independent media, but also to highlight the struggles and dangers journalists face to inform and empower the public.

This year, WPFD was observed at a crucial moment for Southeast Asia. While the creation of a new human rights body for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations invites hope and options for action, difficulties and challenges faced by governments, people and communities are stretching political leaders’ confidence in, and commitment to, free media. With elections looming for Burma and the Philippines, debates about defamation of religion coming to the fore in Indonesia and Malaysia, a political crisis in Thailand and national security concerns being invoked throughout the region from Vietnam to Singapore and East Timor, the values and principles that form the foundation of this day’s annual commemoration are being tested.

The murder of 31 journalists in Maguindanao in the southern Philippines in November (and some dubious turns in the tenuous prosecution of the suspected masterminds behind the massacre) provide the most graphic backdrop to how vulnerable journalists remain. And yet the murder of journalists is only one form of violence against the free press that we decry on this day. Throughout the region, journalists and media workers suffer physical threats, social ostracism and demonization, imprisonment and legal harassment. Indeed, not only journalists and writers, but even their defenders — lawyers and human rights advocates — are being arrested and harassed, from Vietnam, Burma and Cambodia to Singapore and the Philippines.

National security laws also hang over the heads of journalists from the region. Defamation remains a criminal offense throughout the region. Insult laws (including lese majeste in Thailand) are abused and wielded supposedly to preserve stability and/or protect culture and religious sensitivities.

All such laws are now being transposed (if not strengthened) to be applicable over online and mobile news and commentary, in a regionwide (if not worldwide) effort among governments to stem an overwhelming flow of information facilitated by new media. As journalism, media and access to information are revolutionized in the digital century, governments are frantically redoubling their efforts to control the flow of information.

To make matters worse, threats to the region’s press come not only from states, but also from non-state actors driven by religious, ethnic, cultural and political intolerance, and exacerbated by weak rule of law. The situation in the Philippines, where more than 100 journalists have been killed since 1986, remains attributable to government failures, a weak justice system and unbridled local power at the community level.

A general lack of media literacy in Southeast Asia has also made journalists vulnerable to misunderstanding, making them targets of mob anger as well as the wrath of public officials and politicians. In Thailand, recent skirmishes between soldiers and antigovernment protesters have literally caught media workers in the crossfire. Foreign and local journalists have been the direct victims of hostility from officials and protesters who want them to choose sides.

Religious fundamentalists are among the most aggressive harassers of media in parts of Indonesia and Malaysia, using religious intolerance ironically as a pretext to regulate free expression.

Still, World Press Freedom Day was not founded just as an exercise in lament. It is also there to prompt everyone to consider where we can move forward — or at least hope to — in protecting and promoting free expression, press freedom and access to information for all Southeast Asians. This very month, the Philippines is considering the last-minute passage of landmark legislation that could strengthen access to information. Indonesia’s own version of a Freedom of Information Act came into force last week, joining Thailand as the only countries in Southeast Asia to fully implement such rules for government transparency. Even Vietnam in 2009 started exploring options to raise its people’s access to information. And in one of the little-noticed developments of 2009, Laos ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, including Article 19, which recognizes free expression and access to information as a fundamental right.

And then there is the formal convening this year of the Asean Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights. The very existence of the commission provides free expression and press advocates at least some platform for invoking the “fundamental freedoms” the region’s governments commit themselves to.

To be sure, with chairmanship of Asean in 2010 transferring from Thailand to Vietnam, the big question is, how far will Asean and its human rights commission go in recognizing press freedom. The answer to that will only be known over the coming years. However, it will be crucial to everything, from having a credible road map to democracy for Burma to addressing impunity in the Philippines and protecting the integrity of the Internet as a democratic medium.

The commission will be crucial, in other words, to determining whether the people of Southeast Asia will enjoy human rights protections. On World Press Freedom Day, the region’s leaders must acknowledge what the international community has long formally embraced: that without press freedom, free expression and access to information, guarantees of rights and efforts for development and good governance are stunted and potentially destined to fail.

The Southeast Asian Press Alliance is a coalition of journalist and press freedom advocacy groups from around the region.