Annual Report: Office of the Special Rapporteur calls attention to the increase of violence against media workers in 2004
Washington, D.C., April 19, 2005. In its evaluation of the situation of freedom of expression in 2004, the Office of the Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) called attention to the increase in the acts of violence against media workers in the Region. In the 2004 Annual Report there are accounts of 11 murders of media workers related to their work as journalists. The IACHR presented its Annual Report before the Committee on Juridical and Political Affairs of the Organization of American States (OAS) last Friday, April 15, 2005. The third volume of the report contains the Report of the Office of the Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression.
Besides the evaluation of the situation of freedom of expression in the Region, the report of the Office includes a summary of the caselaw on freedom of expression in the United Nations Human Rights Committee; a report on access to information in the member states of the OAS; and contains a doctrinal report on concentration of media ownership and its impact on freedom of expression. The annual report also analyzes the problem of hate speech in the context of the exercise of freedom of expression.
Moreover, the Office, following its biannual custom, reported the state of advances and setbacks in the limitations to freedom of expression through laws of desacato and of criminal defamation. This year, the Office highlighted the important decisions of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which stressed the importance of freedom of expression in democratic societies by rejecting criminal liability as consequence of determined expressions.
When making the report public, the Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression asserted that “the great challenge facing the attacks on freedom of expression and of the press is that the society in its whole must take them on as their own fundamental rights, for their development and life in democracy, and not as a rights of a few privileged ones”.