About
UNFree Media (unfreemedia.com) helps jailed, banned and silenced journalists, writers, bloggers and documentary-makers overcome censorship by turning them into foreign correspondents.
By allowing them them to publish at will, it frees them from the grip of state control of the media, which is so pervasive in many parts of the world.
Finally there is is a place where they can write, report and broadcast freely, without government interference.Its a bottom up service which aims to showcase the journalism, blogs, songs, poems, videos of banned and silenced communicators. There's also a busy news, comment and review service where we follow new cases of censorship. This is a new site and well worth keeping an eye on. Some of the best foreign stories may surface here first. You can follow us with a feed, through Facebook or Twitter and soon with email updates.
There's a top level international site and a growing number of regional and country-level sites, like UNFree Media Zimbabwe being added as required. These are run and maintained by local independent journalists, in English and in future in local languages. The journalists and editors post stories and blogs which are automatically cross-posted to the international site and the news feed.
As every foreign correspondent knows, local knowledge is everything. A well informed local journalist can be invaluable. This site aims to put these resources on tap for other media to draw on, while raising the profile of the local journalists facing repression and censorship.
There are far more silenced reporters, writers and bloggers than you would imagine. And, in many countries, those who fall foul of the authorities struggle to survive. In 2009, more than 1,000 journalists - many of them bloggers - were jailed worldwide. Numerous others were attacked and a large number killed.
Multi-year jail sentences are often handed out to terrorize the media in a number of countries. In a vein similar to domestic violence, the more you seek to open your eyes to it, the more cases of it you encounter.
China's Liu Xiaobo received an 11 year term on Christmas Day. Uzbekistan's well known filmmaker and photographer Umida Ahmedova may be sent to a work-camp when her trial concludes. Her crime? Producing a coffee table book with Swiss Embassy money, called "Women and men: from dawn till dusk". It "insults and slanders" the Uzbek people according to the Tashkent police investigator
All this is happening as the world's major news organizations shutter their foreign bureaus and drastically reduce travel allowances. (See Foreign Affairs Magazine's take on the downward spiral of foreign reporting in the January/February edition.)
Despite the cuts "stories still need to be told," as Bruce Shapiro, Director of the Dart Center on Journalism and Trauma says, "and why shouldn't thoughtful news professionals in so many parts of the world be the narrators of their own news?"
There are plenty around. For decades, a network of great local independent-minded journalists have been the invisible 'fixers' for the network and newspaper correspondents who came parachuting in from abroad. So many of these excellent independent-minded journalists are now banned from working by the state owned media in their respective countries.
UNFree media gives them a chance to break stories in their own names. If enough people take notice of their work, they may be able to avoid a hellish jail sentence. That's been the secret of Yoani Sanchez's survival. Cuba's famous blogger is published in about 35 languages and so far the authorities in Havana haven't dared lift a finger against her.
UNFree Media (unfreemedia.com) can help embattled journalists around the world in much the same way. It provides an individual country or (and?) regional website to which the journalist can post as well as edit. The reporters just need to get online at unfreemedia.com or contact editor@unfreemedia.com. They can also get in touch via a Facebook page here
Read more about our aims here and about the many organizations working for freedom of expression around the world. Help bring attention to the shocking abuse faced by hundreds of talented communicators by letting others know about this network.
Can you name a single jailed or censored writer or journalist?
But why do we know so little about the writers and journalists facing
censorship and imprisonment like Fabio Prieto Llorente (left)? A correspondent
for the banned Havana Press agency and for the former news site
cubafreepress.org, Prieto was one of thirty-five journalists, writers and
librarians sentenced during the one-day trials held on 3-4 April 2003. Prieto
was sentenced to twenty years imprisonment.
Whatever reason is given to justify repression against independent voices in Cuba,
Burma/Myanmar, Sri Lanka and others, the story is always the same. Countries that have signed up to the Universal Declaration of Human rights (Article 19 enshrines the righ to free expression) abuse their own laws to terrorize free-thinking journalists. They routinely hand out
cruel jail sentences to those deemed to have offended their laws. Article 19 states that : "Everyone has the right to
freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions
without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas
through any media and regardless of frontiers." The UN is powerless to change
this sort of behavior in the face of national sovereignty.
No fair minded person disputes
that the rising generation of bloggers, journalists and writers have international legal right to freedom of expression. UNFree
Media is a practical way of bringing the work of these
gagged communicators to prominence.
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During Ireland's war of independence, Brendan Behan, the Irish Republican bomber turned playwright, was lionized in London and New York despite his extremist politics. But how much do we know about the celebrated Pakistani poet incarcerated in Guantanamo Bay, who scratched his poems on the sides of a Styrofoam cup with a pebble. Under the eyes of prison guards, they were secretly passed from cell to cell.
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As the war against Al Qaeda spreads from Afghanistan to Pakistan and now Yemen and the Horn of Africa we might want to know more about the writers and communicators in these countries who often face censorship and death threats. They include people like Daoud Sediqi, former presenter of Afghan Star now in exile in the US. The same goes for so many journalists and writers in Egypt, Georgia, Turkey, Tibet, Burma, Zimbabwe and China.
Around the world journalists are being censored and imprisoned at a frightening rate. Organizations like the Committee to Protect Journalists, International PEN and the International Press Institute work hard to protect them and their families. PEN's list of jailed writers, journalists and publishers who were imprisoned, attacked or killed in the first half of 2009 records 644 cases in 98 countries.
Sixty years ago Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights asserted: "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."
Before the ink was dry, signatories, including Turkey, Burma, Cuba, Iraq and Iran had moved to imprison journalists and writers. In many more countries and confessional societies today, exercising freedom of expression results in torture, jail and even death. The point of UNFree Media exists to provide a megaphone for these threatened writers and a spotlight of shame on their abusers who walk the halls on the United Nations with impunity.
Contact us at Editor@UNFreemedia.com
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