UN Rights Chiefs Pushes Protections for Journalists Under Siege

As a number of governments are accused of using the cover of COVID-19 to try to prevent critical media reports, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet said journalists need protection.

Journalists continue to face harassment, threats and murder around the world, with recent reported cases from Mexico to India, Afghanistan and the Philippines.

Speaking at an event in support of press freedom in Geneva, she noted that around 1,000 journalists have been killed in the last decade – and that nine in 10 cases “are unresolved,” the killers operating with impunity, according to UN News.

She spoke just ahead of the start of the trial of alleged accomplices of extremists who killed 12 people at the French satirical weekly magazine, Charlie Hebdo in 2015, backed up 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. Even journalists in the United States have found themselves arrested for covering protests, assaulted by police and Federal agents with consent of the courts.

“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,” said Chappatte.

Bachelet said the role of journalists is more critical now, to bring the truth of the pandemic and government responses, adding their work is “an essential tool for officials to quickly learn where measures are being inadequately applied.”

There have been a number of scandals around purchases of COVID-19 equipment and disbursement including in South Africa, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Bangladesh. Meanwhile, Interpol uncovered a sophisticated fraud scheme for equipment in Germany, Ireland and the Netherlands among others.

Bachelet wouldn't name transgressors, but said several countries had seen “increasing politicization 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”.

She added: “When journalists are targeted in the context of protests and criticism, these attacks are intended to silence all of civil society and this is of deep concern…Journalism enriches our understanding of every kind of political, economic and social issue; delivers crucial – and, in the context of this pandemic - life-saving information; and helps keep governance at every level, transparent and accountable.”

At a press conference after the event, Swiss President Simonetta Sommaruga said,

“The freedom of the press is not something that you just have, it’s something that you have to defend and continue to defend.”