Miami (December 12, 2013)— The IAPA is supporting the plea made by Honduras National Human Rights Commissioner Ramón Custodio requesting the government to conduct a diligent investigation and hand out punishment for the unpunished crimes against 39 journalists.
Since 2003, 40 members of the press have been murdered in the Central American country, with 39 of the cases – 97.5% – remaining unpunished. “Just one has resulted in legal action,” expressed Custodio during a press release issued in Tegucigalpa in which he talked about the “failures of the institutions in charge of investigating,” meaning few cases result in justice.
The chairman of the IAPA’s Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information, Claudio Paolillo, said that for several years now, his organization has been calling on President Porfirio Lobo and other Honduran officials to apply measures to protect journalists, to create a special investigation unit and special courts to deal with such crimes.
“We regret that so many requests, like the one being made right now by the Human Rights Commissioner, continue to fall on deaf ears,” said Paolillo, editor of the Montevideo, Uruguay, weekly Búsqueda. He added that the IAPA will continue to call on the authorities to act urgently, investigate, put on trial and convict the perpetrators and masterminds of the unpunished murders.
According to Commissioner Custodio, the high degree of impunity “shows that Honduras continues to be a country without justice for victims and without punishment of the murderers.” It is unknown if the impunity that exist in the country “is due to poor investigations or poor requirement on the part of the Public Prosecutor’s Office,” but what he recognized as being true is that the investigators are failing to fully use the technology at their disposal.
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.
