Open Letter
The Secretary General of the international media watchdog Reporters Without Borders has written an Open Letter to the PM calling on him to recognize the alarming decline in the state of press freedom in Pakistan and to take urgent measures to address this. “When asked, during an official visit to the United States last week, about recent press freedom violations in your country, you replied: ‘Pakistan has one of the freest presses in the world (...) To say there are curbs on the Pakistan press is a joke’. There is nothing funny about this ‘joke’ for journalists in your country. You claim that the Pakistani press is one of the freest in the world. ‘The Pakistani media is even freer than the British media’, you added at another point during your visit. It is clear that either you are very poorly informed, in which case you should urgently replace the people around you, or you are knowingly concealing the facts, which is very serious, given your responsibilities. Just a few hours after you landed in the United States, the leading Pakistani TV news channel, Geo News, was censored yet again. Your fellow citizens found a blank screen when they tried to obtain independent, public interest reporting about your trip from this channel. A month ago, a live Geo News interview with former President Asif Ali Zardari by the well-known journalist Hamid Mir was cut short after just a few minutes without any explanation. When contacted by RSF, the interviewer blamed you for this sudden and completely arbitrary act of censorship. The signals of three other Pakistani TV news channels, AbbTakk TV, 24 News and Capital TV, were suddenly suspended from cable TV services on 8 July without any warning to their management, and remained suspended for several days. Najam Sethi, a well-known journalist who often works with 24 News, confirmed to RSF that the suspension was a reprisal for their coverage of a press conference by Maryam Nawaz Sharif, another opposition figure. These brazen cases of censorship, which seriously threaten journalistic independence and pluralism, are characteristic of non-democratic regimes.”
The Sec General goes on to name several journalists who have been attacked — some fatally — in the first year of this government. The letter warns that the crackdown on the Press must stop, because “the credibility of the Pakistani state and democracy is at stake.”