At issue was a bill passed on June 20 by the Colombian House of Representatives which sets out regulations governing the practice of journalism and would create a National Press Council empowered to issue a certificate of suitability for working as a journalist. The Council would serve as an advisory body of the national government and would issue a code of ethics for journalists.
Rafael Molina, chairman of the IAPAs Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information, said he was optimistic that the measure will be set-aside by the new Congress session beginning July 20.
Colombia, the oldest democracy in Latin America, cannot go erasing all the advances made to date in the area of freedom of the press, and much less on the question of who may or may not work as a journalist, said Molina, editor of the Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, news magazine Ahora.
Molina said that the notion of suitability to be a journalist and issuance by a National Press Council of journalist accreditation is nothing more than a return to the concept of obligatory licensing of journalists which was thrown out in Colombia on March 18, 1998 by the Constitutional Court when it repealed Law 51 of 1976, ruling that there should be no requirement that a person have a university degree to work as a journalist and for there to be freedom of information.
The Court ruling echoed an advisory opinion issued in 1985 by the Inter-American Human Rights Court saying that a law requiring obligatory licensing of journalists is incompatible with the American Convention on Human Rights because it prevents those not belonging to a professional guild from working as journalists and limits practice of the profession to university journalism school graduates. The advisory opinion was later the basis for journalist licensing laws being declared unconstitutional in the Dominican Republic and Costa Rica.
Regarding standards of ethical conduct that would be imposed in Colombia by an official body such as the proposed National Press Council, Molina declared that this is the sole responsibility of journalists and the media themselves, quoting the Declaration of Chapultepec and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights Declaration of Principles of Freedom of Expression.
The IAPA sees government attempts to regulate the press as amounting to a contravention of Article 13 of the 1969 American Convention on Human Rights which states that everyone has the right to freedom of thought and expression. This right includes freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing, in print, in the form of art or through any other medium of ones choice.
The IAPA described as discriminatory a similar bill being debated in Panama, which would create a press council, require journalists to be university graduates and lay down a code of ethics.
Similar to what happened in Colombia, in Panama Law 55 of 1999, which provided
for establishment of a Technical Press Board that would issue licenses to work
as a journalist, was repealed. The new measure would therefore be a setback
to press freedom, the IAPA argued.
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