EUR: Reporters beaten, jailed over green issues: rights group
Fri Sep 18 05:27:02 EST 2009
Thu Sep 17 19:27:02 UTC 2009
PARIS, Sept 17 AP - Journalists face increasing threats when they report on companies and governments damaging the environment, a media rights group says, citing arrests, violence and disappearances of those who denounce deforestation, pollution and other damage.
These pressures show that ecological issues "have assumed an enormous political and geostrategic importance", the Reporters Without Borders advocacy group said in a report published on Thursday.
"In many countries ... journalists who specialise in the environment are on the front line of a new war," the Paris-based group said.
It listed journalists jailed in Russia, sent to re-education camps in China, sued in Brazil and beaten up in various countries as victims of retaliation because they investigated large-scale pollution and environmental degradation.
One radio journalist in the Philippines, Joy Estriber, known for his criticism of intensive logging, was kidnapped in 2006 and has been missing since.
In most cases, the violence "is the work of thugs in the pay of criminal entrepreneurs or corrupt politicians", the report said.
But in 2008 journalist Mikhail Beketov was beaten nearly to death by local government thugs who did not like his coverage of a plan to build a highway through a Russian forest, it said.
The report did not single out large international companies, but listed firms in the Philippines or Brazil, for example, that have filed multiple lawsuits against journalists.
In Uzbekistan, the reporters group says Solidzhon Abdurakhmanov has been summarily sentenced to 10 years' jail in 2008 on dubious drug trafficking charges because he reported on the Aral Sea ecological disaster. In June of this year, two Chinese activists were charged with "divulging state secrets abroad" and "spreading rumours" for publishing information about radioactive contamination at a uranium mine.
The media rights group called on governments to make more efforts to protect journalists covering these issues.
