We have a victory of sorts to report. You may have seen on the website that one of our letters this month rather hotly protested to President Rafael Correa of Ecuador about his draconian crackdown on his country’s media. Among other abuses, he had filed a criminal libel suit against the newspaper, El Universo, and his courts had fined the paper a crippling $40 million and sentenced three of its executives to three-year jail terms. In another case, the co-authors of a book charging that the president’s brother was peddling influence had been ordered to pay $2 million in damages — even though the brother had confirmed his links to businesses that won state contracts. Well, yesterday, President Correa said he was dropping both cases and pardoning the defendants.
This may have had something to do with the fact that the Organization of American States had already ordered Ecuador to re-consider the cases. It is also true that a whistle-blowing judge had accused Correa of having one of his own attorneys write the decision that a judge handed down against El Universo. But we like to think that our letter had some small part in feeding the international wave of protest that finally forced Correa to back down.
I called it a victory “of sorts,” because it remains to be seen whether Correa has succeeded in intimidating other journalists in Ecuador. He has proven he can do what he likes, and the Supreme Court has upheld the fines and jail sentences. We may not have written our last letter to Correa.
In the past month, we have sent more such letters. We criticized the king of Morocco for jailing an 18-year-old satirist, Walid Bahomane, who poked fun at the king on YouTube. We sent another letter to China, denouncing the ten-year prison sentence given an online writer, Li Tie, for calling for democracy and human rights in China. We criticized Saudi Arabia for its charge of blasphemy against a writer, Hamza Kashgari, who had the temerity to imagine a candid conversation with the Prophet Muhammad. We also denounced Malaysia for helping the Saudis by turning Kashgari over to their agents when his plane to New Zealand stopped in Kuala Lumpur; the Malaysians did not bother with the formality of a deportation hearing or even keep any record that Kashgari had been in the country. Now he faces a possible death sentence. Another letter that went out today deplored the murders of two Brazilian journalists within a single week, noting that both of them had a record of exposing corruption. One, Mario Randolfo Marques Lopez, had miraculously survived being shot five times in the head last July in a similar attempt to kill him.
That last letter was written by an intern, Rixey Browning, a student at Bard who has been helping Sonya Fry with the awards entries and had some spare time when that job was largely finished. She did a fine job with the letter, and I hope to use her again.
But I am also happy to report that the committee has hired its own intern, Marissa Miller, a graduate of NYU, to help us with letters, write articles for the website, and primarily to expand the OPC presence in the social media. Marissa will be working most closely with Abi Wright, and she will be with us for about twelve weeks, until the end of the school year. If this experiment is a success, we will be asking the board to fund a press freedom intern for the next academic year.
Respectfully submitted by:
Larry Martz
Chairman