Bolivia

WHEREAS the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navanethem Pillay, in her recent report on the state of human rights in Bolivia in 2010 urged the Bolivian National Legislative Assembly “to ensure that all local laws fully respect the standards and principles of international law on human rights and amend all those already adopted regulations when they could affect those principles” and called on the government “to ensure an adequate balance between the right to freedom of expression and prohibition of dissemination of ideas based on racial superiority or hatred, incitement to racial discrimination and acts of violence”; WHEREAS these recommendations amount to a strong criticism of mutilations that freedom of expression and of the press in Bolivia are suffering as a consequence of the Electoral System Law and the Anti-Racism and All Forms of Discrimination Law; WHEREAS the president of the Congress of Bolivia, Álvaro García Linera, has discounted the possibility that the legislature consider a Citizen Legislative Initiative to eliminate Clause 16 and amend Clause 23 of the Anti-Racism and All Forms of Discrimination Law, introduced by press organizations to re-establish the freedom of expression violated by the two clauses; WHEREAS the Citizen Legislative Initiative, supported in addition by hundreds of thousands of people, is established in the Political Constitution of the State in full force as a right of the Bolivian people to introduce legislative bills on their interests; that is why nobody has the power to deny this constitutional right on the argument that it needs regulatory legislation; WHEREAS senior government officials frequently blame the news media for increases in the price of food and fuel when in truth smuggling is responsible for it, the control of which is exclusively that of the government; WHEREAS despite three years having passed continuing to go unpunished is the murder of journalist Carlos Quispe Quispe by peasants who beat him with sticks and kicked him in March 2008 in the Andean rural township of Pucarini; WHEREAS the Interior Ministry has not as yet fulfilled its commitment of two years ago to arrest and punish the police officers who fired on reporters from the Unitel television network on September 3, 2009 and on September 26 that same year on reporters from the PAT television network; WHEREAS principle 2 of the Declaration of Chapultepec states that “every person has the right to seek and receive information, express opinions and disseminate them freely; no one may restrict or deny these rights”; THE IAPA MIDYEAR MEETING RESOLVES: to ask the National Legislative Assembly to remove from the adopted laws the clauses that amount to obvious censorship of the press and mutilation of freedom of expression, thus adhering to the recommendations of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights; to ask the president of the Congress of Bolivia to observe the Constitution and put under way the Citizen Legislative Initiative, the appropriate legal mechanism for restoration of freedom of expression, thus coming into line with international standards on this fundamental right, as the United Nations requests; to ask the national authorities to avoid making unfounded accusations against media and journalists and have resort to ethics tribunals for the press when it is seen it is committing errors; to urge the judiciary to be concerned about the impunity surrounding the murder of journalist Carlos Quispe Quispe, committed by peasants in Pucarani in March 2008, putting on trial and punishing the perpetrators and masterminds; to ask the Interior Ministry to fulfill its commitment made more than two years ago to put on trial the police officers who fired on reporters from the Unitel and PAT television networks, among them Captain Walter Andrade, identified by the journalists as one of the assailants.