Conference: Mechanisms to ensure safety to journalists

UN Action plan against impunity to be discussed.

Aimed at building capacity to deal with safety for journalists and impunity issues, a two-day international conference will be held here on Wednesday (today).

The conference is designed to highlight and raise awareness about a new UN Action Plan Against Impunity in five pilot countries including Pakistan and will highlight the issue of 90 Pakistani journalists killed in recent years.

Federal Minister for Information and Broadcasting Qamar Zaman Kaira is scheduled to inaugurate the conference.

The UN Plan of Action is expected to be rolled out in the coming weeks in Pakistan and is aimed at lending international support for action against impunity, including strengthening efforts led by both governments and the media sector and facilitating greater multi-stakeholder collaboration.

Attending the conference will be representative associations of media workers, owners and professionals and media defence groups.

The conference will aim to establish two alliances — a “Pakistan Alliance of Media on Safety” and an “International Friends of Pakistan Media on Safety” — by linking up media defence groups from Pakistan with their key international level counterparts to facilitate networking on solutions and ideas as well as inflow of international support, advocacy expertise and technical assistance for Pakistan’s media.

The conference seeks to bring together all key stakeholders from within Pakistan and key international media defence groups to discuss ways of combating the violence against media and journalists in the country and what best lessons from the world Pakistan can partly adopt.

Over 90 journalists have been killed in Pakistan since year 2000 and at least 70 journalists in the last five years alone and hundreds attacked, injured, kidnapped, arrested and intimidated in a variety of ways.

From 2007 to 2013, the average of journalists killed every year is 13 — one every 28 days. There has been no prosecution and conviction of any attacker — the prevalence of impunity is huge. Despite recent efforts by a variety of actors to combat this trend, the scale of impunity hasn’t been dented.

The conference will be conducted by Intermedia Pakistan, a national media support and development group – with support from Foundation Open Society Foundation-Pakistan, International Media Support and United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 6^th, 2013.