By Tito Drago
MADRID, Oct 14 1999 (IPS)

Communications media and journalists in Europe and Latin America have taken up the cause of nearly one hundred reporters imprisoned in 19 countries, responding to a sponsorship campaign launched Thursday by Reporters Sans Frontieres (RSF – Reporters without Borders).

Fernando Castelló, RSF international president and journalist for Spain’s Efe news agency, said at a Madrid press conference that the campaign is an effort to ensure that journalists “whose only crime was to try to do their work are not forgotten.”

RSF, a Paris-based non-governmental organisation, is pairing up approximately 80 television and radio stations, newspapers and journalists with the individual cases of imprisoned reporters.

Castelló pointed to the situation of Chinese reporter Liu Jingseng, sentenced in 1992 to 15 years in prison, who has never been allowed visits by his wife and daughter. Liu Jingseng’s case is now being sponsored by the Swiss television station, Romande, and the Colombian El Espectador newspaper.

The case of Cuban reporter Jesús Joel Díaz Hernández was also highlighted by the RSF leader. Díaz Hernández, arrested on January 18 this year, is now sponsored by the Madrid newspapers El Mundo and ABC.

Syrian journalist Nizar Nayuf was sentenced in 1992 to 10 years of forced labour in a Damascus military prison. Nayuf is paralysed as a result of torture and suffers from leukemia, but he has not been given any medical attention, said Catelló.

The journalist organisation believes sponsorship campaigns are important to fight for the freedom and rights of imprisoned reporters and to provide them with moral support.

RSF quotes Nigerian reporter Cristina Anyanwu who, upon her release from prison June 16, 1998, expressed her thanks “to all those who kept up pressure on the Nigerian government to secure my release.”

Media organisations and journalists sponsoring the prisoners commit themselves to providing the individual with special attention, giving them both humanitarian and informational support.

RSF hopes that each person supporting the campaign will sign the on-line petitions for the release of specific journalists that are found at Reporters Sans Frontieres website (http://www.rsf.fr).

RSF maintains that censorship, bans, and arrests of reporters are common practices in more than half of the world.

“Today there are still two billion people living under political regimes that violate the right to information on a daily basis,” affirmed Castelló.

The countries holding journalists prisoner for exercising their profession are Burma, Cameroun, China, Cuba, the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Lybia, Nigeria, Ruanda, South Korea, Syria, Togo, Tunisia, Turkey, Uzbekistan, Vietnam and Yemen.

RSF was founded in 1985 by French journalist Robert Ménard and is backed by the human rights organisation Amnesty International. In 1990, RSF established May 3 as International Day of Freedom of the Press – officially recognised by the United Nations in 1994.

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