Miami (January 21, 2010)–The Inter American Press Association (IAPA) today expressed great concern at the sentencing of two newsman with Spain’s Cadena SER to 21 months in prison and order not to work any longer as journalists handed down by a Madrid court on a charge of “disclosure of secrets” in their airing on the news network’s online portal allegations of wrongdoing in the functioning of a political party.
Cadena SER’s director, Daniel Anido, and news editor, Rodolfo Irago, were convicted in late December and sentenced by Madrid Criminal Court 16 Judge Ricardo Rodríguez Fernández to one year and nine months’ imprisonment and ordered to pay fines and reparations to their alleged victims, as well as to undergo “special disqualification from running news media and practicing journalism.”
IAPA President Alejandro Aguirre, managing editor of the Miami, Florida, Spanish-language newspaper Diario Las Américas, said that although case the in Spain, a country that has welcomed the IAPA on two occasions for its annual General Assembly, was outside the organization’s traditional sphere of action in the Western Hemisphere, “its dimension obliges us to react, because a dangerous legal precedent for press freedom is being set, in jailing journalists who have only done what they are required to do – report on wrongdoing in matters of public interest that involve public agencies.”
The case dates back to June 17, 2003, when Cadena SER aired an allegation by a member of the Popular Party, based in the town of Villaviciosa de Odón on the outskirts of Madrid, to the party chairman concerning its internal electoral process.
Aguirre said that the court ruling, in which the judge made a distinction between news disseminated by traditional media and that aired online, “surprises us in the IAPA and a countless other world and Spanish organizations, due to its having been an excessive measure and one that failed to take into account principles of freedom of expression and human rights highly accepted on an international level on the fact that freedom of the press must be respected, independent of whatever medium concerned.”
The IAPA is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the defense and promotion of freedom of the press and of expression in the Americas. It is made up of more than 1,300 print publications from throughout the Western Hemisphere and is based in Miami, Florida. For more information, please go to http://www.sipiapa.org
