The wrong-headedness of the Bermuda Government’s recent attempts to muzzle the media in Bermuda is attracting more external attention:
More trouble in paradise for the staff of Bermuda’s Royal Gazette and its sister newspaper, the Mid-Ocean News, after premier Ewart Brown bizarrely responded to their campaign for more government transparency and a freedom of information law — by trying to cut their access to government spokesmen…
Ludicrous as the strategy reads, it’s seen as further evidence of Brown’s frustration at the failure of his bid to silence the papers’ criticism by stopping their state advertising and subscription deals in March 2008.
This kind of ‘soft censorship’ is common across the Americas and the Caribbean, and roundly condemned by press freedom activists and by constitutional lawyers.
“Government discrimination in the placement of advertising is an act of indirect coercion that is contrary to freedom of speech,” ruled Argentina’s Supreme Court when seeing off a similar bid by a provincial government to block a critical paper.
See also the Guardian’s Media Blog.
The situation is also met by the unsual situation of Bermuda’s Human Rights Commission needing to seeking guidance from the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.
“The HRC is considering whether the order issued by the Premier, if true, is an infringement of freedom of expression, which is guaranteed by the Bermuda Constitution, the European Convention of Human Rights and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”
The situation is wrong. We all know it’s wrong. And it’s a sad comment that the HRC needs to seek “political cover” from outside of Bermuda’s overwrought atmosphere to say that it’s wrong.
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