Safety and impunity issues of Pakistani Journalist

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By MUHAMMAD DAUD KHAN

Published: March 6, 2013

       

A two-day international conference begins in Islamabad on Wednesday at the local hotel in Islamabad to highlight and raise awareness about a new UN action Plan Against Impunity in five pilot countries, including Pakistan, with the objective of building the country’s capacity to deal with safety of journalists and impunity issues and to highlight the issue of 90 Pakistani journalists killed in recent years

The UN Plan of action is expected to be rolled out in the coming weeks in Pakistan and is aimed at lending international support for action against impunity, including strengthening efforts led by both governments and the media sector and facilitating greater multi-stakeholder collaboration.

The international conference hosting by Intermedia Pakistan, a national media support and development group – with support from United Nations Educational, Scientific & Cultural Organization (UNESCO) some other mainstream journalistic organization, among others, government, security agencies and civil society representatives.

The conference main aim is to establish two alliances – a “Pakistan Alliance of Media on Safety” and an “International Friends of Pakistan Media on Safety” – by linking up media defence groups from Pakistan with their key international level counterparts to facilitate networking on solutions and ideas as well as inflow of international support, advocacy expertise and technical assistance for Pakistan’s media.

The international conference seeks to bring together all key stakeholders from within Pakistan and key international media defence groups to discuss ways of combating the violence against media and journalists in the country and what best lessons from the world Pakistan can partly adopt.

According to intermedia report “In last few years due to hard conflict zone, over 90 journalists have been killed in Pakistan since 2000 and at least 70 journalists in the last five years alone and hundreds attacked, injured, kidnapped, arrested and intimidated in a variety of ways. From 2007 to 2013 the average of journalists killed every year is 13 – one every 28 days.”

There has been no prosecution and conviction of any attacker – the prevalence of impunity is huge. Despite recent efforts by a variety of actors to combat this trend, the scale of impunity hasn’t been dented.

The international conference aims to build on local efforts to raise the public profile of impunity against journalists by bringing together all key stakeholders from within Pakistan and key international media defence groups to discuss ways of combating the violence against media and journalists in the country and what best lessons from the world Pakistan can partly adopt.

The Lahore Times Read more: http://www.lhrtimes.com/2013/03/06/safety-and-impunity-issues-of-pakistani-journalist/#ixzz2Mmu0Tjz0
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