Report to the Board of Governors May 26, 2009

The highlight of the Committee's work since our last meeting was the panel discussion on Mexico's drug violence and its consequences for the journalists who cover it. Mexico is now among the most dangerous places in the world to work in the news business.

The highlight of the Committee’s work since our last meeting was the panel discussion on Mexico’s drug violence and its consequences for the journalists who cover it. The event drew a packed house to Club Quarters in New York on April 27. Larry Martz collaborated with Reporters Without Borders to organize the event, which was the Club’s contribution to the annual world-wide observance of Press Freedom Day on May 3.

Mexico, as the board surely knows, is now among the most dangerous places in the world to work in the news business: 46 journalists killed since 2,000, and another eight reporters who disappeared for unknown reasons. According to Pablo Piccato, who heads Columbia University’s Institute for Latin American Studies, murdering a reporter is less a punishment for spotlighting crime than a kind of advertising for a gang’s strength. The police-blotter pages are the most popular features of Mexican papers, and killing a reporter generates attention that signals a gang’s ascendency. In addition to Piccato, the panel included Alfredo Corchado of the Dallas Morning News and Jorge Luis Sierra, who covers the Mexican border region for several important Mexican publications. It was moderated by Peter Price of Reporters Without Borders.

In the past month, the committee also continued its efforts on behalf of journalists in jeopardy not only in Mexico but in countries around the world including China, Colombia, Congo, Egypt, Fiji, Iran, Madagascar, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia and Yemen.

The situations of reporters held captive in Iran and North Korea were of special concern for the Committee.

When we approached Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad in late April, Iranian-American reporter, Roxana Saberi, had just been tried in secret and given a sentence of eight years in jail on a charge of espionage. Saberi’s serious and now notorious case had been watched for months around the world, not least, by her colleagues in the journalistic community. Though she was arrested in January, Iran’s judiciary never formally made its case against her. For two months after her arrest, Saberi was not even allowed to speak with her lawyers. Not until a report by National Public Radio in the United States in March did an Iranian judicial authority spokesman acknowledge her arrest on the orders of the Tehran Revolutionary Court and her detention in Evin prison.

What started as a charge of trying to buy alcohol illegally, and later of working without press credentials, escalated just before Saberi’s trial to a charge of espionage for the United States -- an accusation for which no evidence was ever presented. In a letter signed by all three of the committee’s co-chairs, we leapt at a comment by Ahmadinejad that Saberi should have the right to defend herself. On May 11, an Iranian appeals court reduced her sentence to two years suspended. Saberi has since returned to the United States.

The story of our captive colleagues in North Korea, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, has so far not had the same happy ending. The two were arrested on March 17 on North Korea’s border with China. In a letter to North Korea Chairman Kim Jong Il right after the arrest, we pointed out that Current-TV, which employs Ling and Lee, said they were on assignment to report on refugees from North Korea entering China. According to Reporters Without Borders, North Korean officials allege that the two journalists crossed illegally over the frozen Tumen river from Chinese territory into North Korea while filming -- a claim challenged by a South Korean television station, YTN, which reported that the journalists and their Chinese guide did not enter North Korean territory. Instead, North Korean troops crossed into Chinese territory and arrested the journalists after they refused to stop filming along the riverfront.

At last report, Ling and Lee are set to go on trial in early June. They are reportedly to be tried on charges of illegally entering the country and perpetrating acts allegedly "hostile." If convicted, they could be sentenced to as much as ten years of hard labor.