Over the past several years, a dire press-freedom situation has emerged in Latin America––now the most dangerous region in the world for journalists, with 105 media workers killed there since 2008, according to IPI’s Death Watch.
In addition to the rising death toll, the number of death threats and instances of physical aggression against members of the media has grown precipitously. And governments are increasingly turning to lawsuits and legislative maneuvers in an effort to silence independent media.
A critical tool in countering this trend is the Organisation of American States’s (OAS) Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression, an office that the International Press Institute (IPI) believes is threatened by a set of recommendations due to be discussed this week at a meeting of the OAS Permanent Council. These recommendations appear to be part of a campaign led by Ecuador to discredit the Office of the Special Rapporteur (OSR) and strip it of its effectiveness. The Ecuadorean government has apparently been angered by the Office’s recent criticism of its actions toward the media.
The OSR, currently led by Colombian lawyer Catalina Botero, falls under the umbrella of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). It is the youngest of eight IACHR human-rights rapporteurships, having been created in 1997 (and the only one called a ‘special’ rapporteurship). Its stated mandate is “to carry out activities for the protection and promotion of the right to freedom of thought and expression”. (The other seven rapporteurships are dedicated to the rights of women, indigenous peoples, children, migrant workers, people of African heritage, human-rights defenders, and persons deprived of liberty.)
In June 2011, the OAS Permanent Council authorised the creation of a Special Working Group, open to all 35 member states, with the aim of “strengthening the inter-American human rights system”. An independent IPI analysis of documents from the proceedings, however, shows that Ecuador used its participation to pursue a radical agenda against the OSR. While Ecuador was the only state to mention the Office explicitly, proposals submitted by Venezuela offered tacit support to Ecuador’s position.
While Ecuador’s proposals purport to affect all eight rapporteurships equally, in practice the proposals disproportionately target the OSR. The country originally set forth seven recommendations, which, taken together, could render the OSR entirely toothless. Ultimately, the working group accepted only three, which nevertheless constitute a significant threat to the office’s work. Sources close to the negotiations told IPI that the Ecuadorean government and its allies forced those three recommendations through during late, down-to-the-wire discussions at the group’s final meeting on 13 December.
The first recommendation proposes including all eight rapporteur reports under a single chapter of the IACHR annual report. The Special Rapporteur’s annual report is the only one of the eight not presently included as such. The annual report on freedom of expression––normally 300-400 pages and containing both detailed analysis of the press-freedom situation in OAS countries and offering recommendations thereto—would be reduced to 2 or 3 pages. This would substantially reduce the Office’s ability to raise awareness of press-freedom violations and generally reduce its impact.
The recommendation needs to be further considered in the wider context of Ecuador and Venezuela’s attempts to water down the larger IACHR annual report. Both countries claim that Chapter IV of the report, which highlights certain countries for their human-rights violations, is biased. Ecuador suggested that the criteria for inclusion on the Chapter IV list should strike “a good balance between private and state sources” and “focus not only on civil and political rights but also on economic, social, and cultural rights.” Venezuela said the Annual Report serves “the interests of several of countries of the region [sic]” and demanded that its findings be “non-discriminatory, non-selective, and non-politicized.”
The second recommendation calls for the IACHR to assign balanced financial resources among all rapporteurships. Unlike the other seven rapporteurships, the OSR does not receive IACHR funding, but rather raises money from outside sources, such as foreign governments and civil-society groups. The Special Rapporteur’s funding report shows that in 2010, the Office received a combined US $750,000 from the European Commission and the British, Swedish, Swiss and French governments.
Ecuador described this second recommendation as necessary to ensure that all human-rights areas can “be addressed on an equal footing.” In a presentation made to the working group, Ecuador proposed the creation of an OAS Regular Fund to finance the rapporteurships as a way of “guaranteeing the independence of the IAHRS”.
Nevertheless, requiring the OSR to reject funding or redistribute to other rapporteurships in order to achieve a balance would result in a loss of 90% of its budget, according to a source familiar with the Office’s finances.
The final recommendation calls for introducing a code of conduct to govern IACHR rapporteurships, which Ecuador claims would “ensure the necessary coordination” between the rapporteurships and member states. Yet critics argue such a code of conduct would more likely restrict the autonomy of the OSR by subjecting it to additional procedural mechanisms and meddling by individual states. IPI believes the ability of the office to work independently is essential to its effectiveness.
In a presentation to the working group on 2 November, Ecuador appeared to summarise its goal in attacking the Special Rapporteur. The presentation criticised the “imbalance” created when “special attention and funding is reserved for monitoring a particular right.” Proceeding to identify the OSR by name, Ecuador said this “distortion” leads “to a mistaken and biased view of the human rights situation in the Hemisphere,” which the country “would like to see corrected”.
Ecuador’s aggressive efforts appear linked to the OSR’s criticisms of the dramatically worsening press-freedom situation in the country. In particular, Ms. Botero has accused the administration of President Rafael Correa of using criminal-defamation laws to suppress independent and opposition media. As IPI earlier reported, a Guayaquil court last July sentenced a journalist and three executives of the opposition daily El Universo to three years in prison and imposed a $40 million fine on charges of libeling the president. The government has pursued several other similar, high-profile cases.
In response, the Correa government called the OSR’s criticism a “crude lie” and announced in October that Ecuador would accept Ms. Botero’s recommendations only when these were “reasonable,” according to regional media. After several Ecuadorean journalists and civil-society representatives attended an IACHR public hearing on Ecuador’s receding press freedom in November, the state ordered all radio and television stations to air discrediting statements about the participants. In mid-December, the president accused Ms. Botero of improperly contracting with Fundamedios, an Ecuadorean media-rights NGO, and Ecuador’s Communication Secretary said this had stripped her of legitimacy. Both incidents were reported in Ecuadorean and regional media.
Meanwhile, media organizations around the world have turned their attention to the attacks on journalists in Ecuador. “President Correa has been condemned by human-rights and press-freedom groups for his mistreatment of reporters,” Mark Hamrick, recent past president of the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., said in a 13 January statement. “It is past time for this type of harassment and intimidation to stop in Ecuador and anywhere else where reporters face jail–or worse–for merely doing their jobs.” Hamrick’s statement followed a previous days scathing editorial in The Washington Post decrying Ecuador’s poor press freedom record.
In anticipation of next week’s permanent council meeting, IPI reaffirmed its strong support for the Office of the Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression. Executive Director Alison Bethel McKenzie said, “As the press-freedom situation in the Americas worsens, the need for a strong and independent Special Rapporteur is greater than ever. The Special Rapporteur is indispensable to ensuring that the rights of free speech and free expression are protected throughout the Western Hemisphere. We urge OAS member states to carefully consider the implications of these recommendations.”
IPI reiterated the concrete progress achieved by the OSR. The Office has been at the forefront of the effort to decriminalise desacato (insult against public figures) and criminal-defamation laws in the region; fought against impunity for crimes committed against journalists; brought attention to instances of both direct and indirect censorship; and lobbied for increased security protection for journalists operating in danger zones. The Office has also been instrumental in improving transparency standards across Latin America.
The outcome of this week’s debate remains unclear. While Ecuador, Venezuela and their allies — including Bolivia and Nicaragua — are likely to pronounce in support of the measure, the position of South American heavyweights Argentina and Brazil is not yet known. IPI will be closely monitoring the debate, scheduled for 25 January, and following developments thereafter.
The four recommendations from Ecuador not accepted by the Special Working Group are: move to finance the rapporteurships from the OAS’s own funds as quickly as possible, ban the rapporteurships from accepting contributions that are “conditioned or earmarked”, promote ‘universality’ in the inter-American human-rights system by making all states subject to the same review, and update the Chapter IV directive to include the aforementioned additional criteria.
