World Association of Newspapers - Cape Town Conference

Cape Town, South Africa, 5 June 2007
For immediate release

World's Press Faces Increasing Surveillance Measures

The World Association of Newspapers has called on democratic governments to take specific measures to protect freedom of the press in the face of widespread tightening of anti-terrorism measures.

"WAN believes that though balancing the sometimes conflicting interests of security and freedom might be difficult, democracies have an absolute responsibility to use a rigorous set of standards to judge whether curbs on freedom can be justified by security concerns," the WAN Board said in a resolution issued during the World Newspaper Congress and World Editors Forum in Cape Town, South Africa.

WAN also issued five other resolutions, to protest against:

- A recent UN Human Rights Council's resolution that attempts to justify
censorship of free speech under the guise of protecting religious
sensibilities (read the full resolution at
http://www.wan-press.org/article14264.html );

- The decade-long judicial harassment of Spanish journalist José Luis
Gutiérrez, who was convicted by Spanish courts of violating Moroccan King
Hassan II's "right to maintain his honor" after Gutiérrez published an
accurate report about the seizure of five tons of hashish inside a truck
belonging to the Moroccan Royal Crown (read the full resolution at
http://www.wan-press.org/article14265.html );

- The almost complete lack of arrests and convictions in the cases of 21
journalists who have been killed in Russia since President Vladimir Putin
came to power in March 2000 (read the full resolution at
http://www.wan-press.org/article14266.html ).

- The repressive government policy against a free press in Zimbabwe,
including the recurrent violations of journalists' basic rights and the
complete disregard for the rule of law (read the full resolution at
http://www.wan-press.org/article14267.html ).

- A raid on the offices of the independent daily Le Quotidien in Senegal
by armed soldiers, the closure of its radio station Premiere FM and the
seizure of broadcasting equipment (read the full resolution at
http://www.wan-press.org/article14339.html.

In the resolution concerned with increasing surveillance measures, WAN
called on democratic governments and their agencies to take seven specific
steps to protect press freedom while tightening anti-terrorism measures:

- To guarantee public availability of officially held data, information
and archives accessible under Freedom of Information laws or related legal
provisions.
- To guarantee the right of journalists to protect their confidential
sources of information, as a necessary requirement for a free press.
 - To make electronic surveillance of communications dependent on judicial
authorisation, control or review, to protect the imperative independence
and confidentiality of newsgathering.
 - To ensure that searches of journalist offices or homes are conducted
uniquely by warrant issued only when there is proven ground for suspicion
of lawbreaking.
 - To guarantee journalists the right to cover all sides of a story,
including that of alleged terrorists, and to restrain from any hasty and
unjustified criminalisation of speech.
 - To abstain from prosecuting journalists who published classified
information. In free societies, courts have held that it is the job of
governments, not journalists, to protect official secrets, subject to the
common sense decisions that editors normally make against, for instance,
endangering lives.
 - To abstain from resorting to ³black² propaganda ­ in other words,
peacetime use of government services to plant false or misleading articles
masquerading as normal journalism as well as the false use of journalistic
identities by intelligence agents.
 Read the full resolution at http://www.wan-press.org/article14263.html .

The Paris-based WAN, the global organisation for the newspaper industry,
defends and promotes press freedom world-wide. It represents 18,000
newspapers; its membership includes 77 national newspaper associations,
newspaper companies and individual newspaper executives in 102 countries,
12 news agencies and 10 regional and world-wide press groups.

Inquiries to: Larry Kilman, Director of Communications, WAN, 7 rue
Geoffroy St Hilaire, 75005 Paris France. Tel: +33 1 47 42 85 00. Fax: +33
1 47 42 49 48. Mobile: +33 6 10 28 97 36. E-mail: lkilman@wan.asso.fr