Impunity - Guatemala

WHEREAS the National Attorney General’s Office named Gustavo Adolfo Barreno special prosecutor for the reopening of the legal case of Irma Flaquer, who disappeared on October 16, 1980 WHEREAS the basis of the friendly agreement continues on the Flaquer case between the Presidential Commission to Coordinate Executive Policy on Human Rights (COPREDEH) and the Inter American Press Association regarding compliance with the agreement’s 12 points WHEREAS Principle 4 of the Declaration of Chapultepec declares that “Freedom of expression and of the press are severely limited by murder, terrorism, kidnapping, intimidation, the unjust imprisonment of journalists, the destruction of facilities, violence of any kind and impunity for perpetrators. Such acts must be investigated promptly and punished harshly” THE IAPA GENERAL ASSEMBLY RESOLVES to urge the Special Prosecutor to make the best efforts to conduct new investigations and find both the murderers and the masterminds to ask COPREDEH to continue working on the following points of the friendly agreement that have not yet been completed: creation of a scholarship, naming a room in the public library to hold Flaquer’s journalistic work, establishing a university chair on the history of journalism, developing a training course for inmates in the Women’s Training Center and letters of apologies to her relatives.