Attacks on journalists are attacks on all civil society: UN rights chief
Geneva, Switzerland (PANA) - UN rights chief Michelle Bachelle has urged all countries to do more to protect journalists, especially during the COVID-19 crisis, as their work helps save lives.
Speaking at an event in support of press freedom in Geneva, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights noted that around 1,000 journalists have been killed in the last decade – and that nine in 10 cases “are unresolved”.
A UN statement said her comments, on the eve of the trial of alleged accomplices of extremists who killed 12 people at the French satirical weekly magazine, Charlie Hebdo in 2015, were echoed by political cartoonist Patrick Chappatte.
“We live in an open world with closed minds,” he told participants at the UN General Assembly side-event for the freedom of the press and freedom of expression.
“We have seen five years ago a line being crossed in blood and that’s the line where you can get killed in Paris, Europe, anywhere, you can get killed for your opinion. And that was a new threshold.”
Amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, the work of the media is paramount, High Commissioner Bachelet continued, as their reporting is “an essential tool for officials to quickly learn where measures are being inadequately applied”, and what concerns are most important to people.
Without naming them, she said that several countries had seen “increasing politicisation of the pandemic and efforts to blame its effects on political opponents, have led to threats, arrests and smear campaigns against journalists who maintain fact-based information about the spread of COVID-19 and the adequacy of measures to prevent it”.
Earlier, Mr. Chappatte described how “moralistic mobs” now used social media to bully others into getting what they want.
“They gather like a storm. They take on an issue, they denounce expression, they denounce cultures, they go after the cartoonists.”
It was no longer repression “by the State or the religious powers, but society ourselves”, he said.
-0- PANA MA 3Sept2020
