I have the pleasure of being here at this special press conference for the World Press Freedom day with a number of colleagues; first and foremost the President of the Press Union of Liberia, Mr. Peter Quaqua along with colleagues from UNESCO, Ms. Lusia Piette. And we have colleagues from the IREX, Mr. Bill Burke who will speak to us and Ms. Tilly Gardner.

 

I would to thank our colleagues from the press who are here today and our UNMIL Radio listeners. World Press Freedom day is very important not only to us as media practitioners but also to entire world and community. We have seen in very recent days how much the press has been essential in getting the word out to local populations and people who have not been able to have access to media; social media, print, radio and television. And we have also seen how media practitioners have been able to benefit from communities contributions to give us information through new social media to send you tube videos and other reports.

 

World Press Freedom Day is also very important for a number of reasons and there is a special statement that we have out here for our colleagues to pick up; both from the Secretary-General and the Director of UNESCO on the occasion of World Press Freedom Day. I will just quote two portions of if; “Freedom of expression is one of our most precious rights. It underpins every other freedom and provides a foundation for human dignity. Free, pluralistic and independent media is essential for its exercise”.

 

We will be here together with our colleagues, President of the PUL, IREX and UNESCO to talk about how this is applicable to Liberia where we are doing for this and what activities are planned around this special day in Liberia.

 

The Secretary-General of the United Nations, Mr. Ban Ki-moon also said media freedom faces severe pressure across the world. We have seen this throughout this year and last year. What is really essential is that world press freedom is an opportunity to raise the flag in the fight to advance media freedom. The Secretary-General will call on May 3 for all states professional and non professional media practitioners and Non-governmental organizations everywhere in the world to join forces with the United Nations, UNESCO and all of its agencies to promote online and offline freedom of the expression. This is in accordance with the international accepted principles. This is the pillar of individual rights; a foundation for healthy society and for social transformation.

 

Thank you, media practitioner who are here, who are listening to be part of this and we look forward to go in the track here in Liberia. There are a number of activities and conferences; and we will here very shortly from guest.

 

For our UNMIL Radio listeners, we just want to remind you that World Press Freedom day was established in 1993 on May 3 and it is a day to celebrate the fundamental principles of press freedom, assess the state of press freedom throughout the world, prevent the media from attack on their independence and pay tributes to those journalists who have lost their lives in the line of duty. And that is something that is very essential.

 

 

Thank you. My colleagues and our partners; the fact that we are here at the Headquarters of UNMIL speaks to the very serious partnership that we have. This year celebration is particularly exciting because this is the first that we have very serious host of partners celebrating world press freedom day with us.

 

We will give you an overview of what is going to happen in Liberia for one week and then we will allow our partners give a synopsis of what they are going to be involved with. We are pleased for the sponsorship of UNESCO, IREX and UNMIL to celebrate this event with us. As you are aware, probably by now the celebration this year is under the theme “New Voices, Media Freedom Helping to transform Societies”.

 

Beginning Monday, the 2^nd of May, we will start celebrating World Press Freedom Day in Liberia with a Conference. This is going to be a mini Mano River Union (MRU) conference and we will allow the UNESCO representative to speak more on that. We have been able to bring two countries from the MRU to Liberia this week to celebrate along with us; Sierra Leone and Cote d’Ivoire. Following the conference on 2 May, we will celebrate officially on 3 May. On the 3^rd, traditionally we parade the streets of Monrovia to showcase the media and to remind society, the Government and ourselves the importance of Press freedom and free expression. And therefore we will be parading through the streets of Monrovia and end up at the campus of the University of Liberia where we hope to have the debate. Again we try to depart from some of the traditions of the past. We have always had politicians and sometimes public figures speak on these occasions. This year we are going to have student debate on the very important aspect of freedom of the media and that is the FOI (Freedom of Information) law. As you are aware, our country passed this; it is the first in West Africa. But we have had some difficulties in implementing this law and therefore the students will be debating. The Topic is “should the denial of FOI request be allowed in countries at a certain stage of development”? That will be the topic for discussion between the University of Liberia and the Stella Marie Polytechnic.

 

Following the May 3 event, normally on world press freedom day, journalists are recognized especially those who died in the performance of their duties. In Liberia, we have never had death in recent past but we like to recognize the effort of journalists who do well on the job. Therefore we will be having our annual award ceremony the next day. These are some of the activities that we have lined up and I like for our colleagues from UNESCO to speak more about the conference on 2 May and also IREX.

 

 

Thank you.

 

This is an event that is celebrated worldwide. It has been going on since the 90s and this year the official event which is sponsored by UNESCO will take place in Tunisia. Here in Monrovia, what we are doing is that, UNESCO decided to sponsor this event as it does for almost every year, but this time it is a little bit more substantial in terms of funding and involvement. We are bringing in Sierra Leone, Cote d’Ivoire, Media professionals. Some of them are journalists and some that worked with the media.

 

The actual conference will take place 2 May 2012. This is part of a very large commitment by UNESCO. We chose to include media sustainability project and IREX is partnering in that. We are working to make sure that the media has the business know how to sustain their outlet. That is part of what UNESCO is doing.

 

 

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen and members of the press.

 

IREX on the global scheme is also partnering with UNESCO in the World Press Freedom activities in Tunis. We believe firmly that without free press there cannot be a civil society. The two are very closely linked. Freedom of Information and of the Press, these are essential for both personal freedom and for countries to move ahead in their development.

 

I applaud Liberia for being the first country in Africa for having the Freedom of Information law. This year we are sending three Liberians to participate in the event in Tunisia and we are very happy about that.

 

From the local scale, we have been in partnership with Mr. Peter Quaqua and UNESCO on various different projects like the media sustainability programs which fits in nicely what IREX is overall. So, we are looking forward to the celebrations this week and encourage Liberians to keep at it and worked hard to ensure that the freedom you have worked so hard for are given to you.

 

Thank you.

 

Thank you.

 

Since the arrival of IREX in Liberia, we have been supporting Liberian journalists to have representation at the World Press Freedom Day Conference. I believe last year was the first time we partner with UNESCO to host the international conference which was held in Washington DC. We had two representatives from Liberia, Malcolm Joseph from the Center for Media Studies and Peace Building and Estella Nelson from the Liberian Women Media Action Committee. This year we again we are supporting three Liberians to be part of the celebration in Tunis; Lawrence Randall, from the Liberia Media Center, Fatumata Fofana, one of the editors at the Daily Observer Newspaper and Patmella Doe our media programme officer will be in Tunis joining journalists from around the world to celebrate world press freedom day.

 

This year, since we collaborate with UNECSO on the international level, and we were approached by our partner, Luisa, to collaborate because we had similar goals and objectives in terms working on media sustainability and we sign a memorandum of understanding. So together with the PUL and UNMIL we are working to ensure that this year celebration will be very successful.

 

In addition to supporting world press freedom day, IREX has been building the capacity of local journalists. Primarily our aim is to improve the professional output of the Liberian media and what other way can we work to improve the output of the Liberian media and then to try to support freedom of expression here in Liberia.

 

It is important that given the level of press freedom we enjoy in this country, it is important that we recognize some of those who came before us, some of those who die in the line of duty fighting for press freedom in this country and some of those who fought for freedom, who are no longer here with us; and I can think of a few of them like Rufus Dapoe, Charles Gbeyon who was killed in 1985, John Vambo who died in the 90s and so many other. It is an honor for us to be part of this celebration, to celebrate the fruit of their labor.

 

Q:      Nathan Charles ( ELBC)

 

            Good question. I am sure if we were to ask how many of you around the table are             independent many of you would put your hands up. I however would define    independence as the content of what you put out. I thought you would have asked           whether the media was free but if we are asking about the independence of the media,             I think there are very many things that speak to what independence is. Personally, I           believe there are some issues including financial independence that are still affecting          the independence of the media here. Many of us are incapacitated and the media is operating vitally under condition of service. Those are things that are affecting the  media if I may. However, if it is the independence for the media to do its work… I             think we have some amount of independence at that level but economically I think we      are still wanting.

 

 

 

Q:        Eugene Myers (Heritage Newspaper)

 

Q:        J.B. Hilton (New Vision Newspaper)

 

            Your question and that of J.B. Hamilton’s are two serious questions that arevery  similar. The true of the matter is that we’ve had some very serious awareness in the             public about freedom of the media and over the last five or perhaps ten years we have            increased that kind of awareness in the public and among public officials about the       need to allow the media to operate freely. I should like to think that we have seen             some low shift but unfortunately we have had intermittent disruption where public            officials have over step some of their authority to infringe on the rights of journalists    and every time they show up we try to remind the Government that it is not in the    interest of our country that we continue to see these things happen because they are           documented and every time people will flag them. So yes, the question of intimidation      is still here but we are hoping that they can go away but I bet it is going to be here for             a long time to come. What we have asked out Government to do is to take action  when these things occur. There is an argument about impunity in the media… it is          Government that has the onus to correct it. At the same time while we frown on             intimidating journalists, we have also been keen of late on how the media performs            and we have to match those two together. As much as we want freedom we must be          responsible for the errors that we commit. Whenever a journalist is violated we will       not mince our words in condemning it and letting the public and the Government    know that it cannot continue but at the same time we have to be ready to correct some      of those problems we have that might be provoking some of these attack. I should like        to emphasize that there is no reason why someone should be attacked …any         justification absolutely. Even if a journalist is unprofessional or not, the place to          correct it is probably the court or to launch a complaint with the Union.

 

 

Q:        Jutomo Gono (In Profile Newspaper)

 

             The benefits to the media… I think just holding these events those we make a       statement but we are engaging majority of the media practitioners operating in the           country including community radios. We are bringing journalists from most of the counties represented in this conference that is happening on May 2nd.We are hoping             that this will be a follow-up to the conference that we had back in September and             some of you participate in the media ethics conference we had which was dedicated to       issues around conflict sensitive reporting. Pre-elections reporting because we were    approaching the election season in Liberia. So the benefits we see is that we have a  forum where journalists much like this press confere4nce can ask questions and get             information about what other organizations are doing and this one we will have two          countries that have similar history of violence. Cote D’Ivoire so very violent post         election season about a year and a half of two years ago and Sierra Leone is gearing             up to have their elections and we can only hope that the experiences of Liberia and     Cote D’Ivoire will help Sierra Leone have a better outcome and have peaceful       elections. We are hoping that by bringing some colleagues from the region that the     shared experiences will help all of you to be better and stronger. As Bill, Tilly,      Yasmina and Peter have said we are working to build capacity but we also want    responsibility from the media, w want the media to abide by universality accepted             media ethics and those are the reasons we are here. If we go by the first conference we         had, we had the participants sign a pledge that they will abide by media ethics and we  know that there are many instances the media in Liberia …some journalists will             lessen their prestige in terms of the way they collect news and receive bribes to write             stories or ask for bribes to write or kill stories so to speak. We don’t want any of that         and that is why we holding this conference and I also wanted to add that this year        theme” New Voices and How the Media can Transform Society “and the new voices         are focusing on the new media. Liberia is going to get high speed internet very soon