Dear friends,
Our year began with Tunisia’s President Moncef Marzouki receiving us at the presidential palace in Carthage, where we defended the cause of media freedom in the country that gave birth to the “Arab springs.” The president gave us an award that says: “Tunisia, grateful to Reporters Without Borders for its active solidarity during the years of heat.”
We submitted memoranda to High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay at Geneva’s Palais Wilson. This was three days before her address to the United Nations Security Council calling for the ICC to investigate war crimes in Syria, and she asked us for information about the crackdown on journalists and netizens there.
We prepared recommendations on “protecting journalists’ sources” for France’s National Consultative Commission on Human Rights (of which I am a member) and for the French government and legislature. A law expected in 2013 will an essential issue for all citizens who desire more transparency in our political and economic life.
At the start of January, Reporters Without Borders issued a report on the Media Spring in Burma. We are constantly gathering information all over the world thanks to our network of 150 correspondents in 130 countries. And thanks to our assistance unit, we provide concrete support to news providers.
WeFightCensorship, our anti-censorship website in French, English and source languages, allows us to push back against censorship, while our Paris-based Radio Erena, the only independent media broadcasting to Eritrea (ranked last in the press freedom index), is back on a satellite again after being the target of technological attacks.
We have launched a petition and support movement throughout Africa for Hassan Ruvakuki, RFI’s correspondent in Burundi, who was initially sentenced to life imprisonment and then to three years in prison on appeal for nothing, for just an ordinary piece of reporting. We are also supporting Mansoureh Behkish, the spokesperson of Iran’s “Mourning Mothers,” who could be sent back to prison, Chinese Nobel peace laureate Liu Xiaobo, who is still in prison, and many others from Turkey to Pakistan and Vietnam.
At Reporters Without Borders headquarters in Paris, in our sections (including Reporter Ohne Grenzen in Germany and Austria, Reportrar utan Gränser in Sweden and Reporteros sin Fronteras in Spain) and in our bureaux in Washington, Brussels, Tunis and Tripoli, to which we sent a representative on 1 January, we are actively defending the freedom to gather, produce and impart news and information.
The freedom envisaged in article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is fundamental. I will never forget what was said last September in Rangoon by Win Tin, who spent 19 years in Burmese prisons: “Freedom of information is the freedom that allows you to verify the existence of all the other freedoms.”
Without you, none of our actions, none of our fights would be possible. Thank you all, for supporting and helping us to defend this right that we care about, the right to inform and to be informed, all over the world.
Christophe Deloire,
General director of Reporters Without Borders
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In a bit of historic irony, powerful oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili has managed to inspire rare unity across Georgia’s cacophonous political scene twice in his life. His money and influence forged the broad-based consolidation of opposition forces that brought him to power in 2012, and now, 12 years and three electoral cycles later, a similar pattern of opposition convergence could send him packing.
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