The African Union Needs to Do More to Support Media Freedom

28.03.10

Members of the African Forum for Media Development and delegates at the 2nd Congress of the Federation of African Journalists in Harare, Zimbabwe on March 27-28 supported African Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression, Pansy Tlakula in her call on the African Union to provide more support for her work.

“The African Charter for Human and People’s Rights makes important provisions for protecting media freedom and independent journalism”, said Pansy Tlakula. “But AU member states do not respect these rights”.

“We make reports on attacks on journalists and press freedom violations”, she said. “But what happens to these reports? The AU does not seem to take any action against member states that do not respect media freedom.”

She called on participants to work in support of her office and to raise awareness among citizens about the rights set out in the African Charter.

Tlakula explained that in theory Africans have recourse at the Human Rights Court in Arusha but NGOs or journalists can only use the court if their country signed a special protocol allowing non-state actors to take cases to the court. So far, only two countries signed such a protocol.

GFMD Director Bettina Peters told delegates about the GFMD’s and AFMD’s work to get more support to the Special Rapporteur on the AU’s agenda.

“At the first AU consultative meeting on media and development in Addis Ababa on March 23-25, we made the point to AUC Chairman Jean Ping that if the AU is serious about promoting media freedom, it needs to provide more support for the structure it set up to defend it – the office of the Special Rapporteur”, she said.

“We need to work together to make sure that media freedom is at the top of the AU-EU summit in November”, Peters said. “The AU-EU partnership speaks a lot about protecting human rights and democracy-building. That will not happen unless more is done to support media freedom.”