MIAMI, Florida (July 29, 2015)—The Inter American Press Association (IAPA) today will present a report on the state of freedom of the press in the Americas during a hearing of the Hemisphere Affairs Sub-Committee of the U.S. Congress House of Representatives.
“We will be sharing with the representatives our experiences regarding freedom of the press and of expression in the hemisphere, where in recent months we have denounced a marked deterioration due to a significant increase in direct and indirect censorship and physical attacks on journalists. We are particularly concerned about this situation in Argentina, Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Venezuela,” declared Claudio Paolillo, chairman of the IAPA’s Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information.
Paolilo, editor of the Montevideo, Uruguay, weekly Búsqueda, will give the organization’s testimony within the framework of a special hearing in the U.S. Capitol building on the greatest violations of press freedom. Paolillo is accompanied by the organization’s executive director, Ricardo Trotti.
During their stay in Washington, D.C., the IAPA officers will also hold meetings with the Inter-American Commission on the Human Rights’ Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression, Edison Lanza, and executives of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights.
As part of its activities to promote and defend press freedom in the Americas an IAPA international delegation will travel next week to Guatemala, where on August 6 it will hold a forum with presidential candidates who have been invited to underscore their commitment to freedom of the press and sign the Declaration of Chapultepec.
In Ecuador the IAPA is also organizing for August 25 jointly with the Ecuadorean Association of Newspaper Publishers and Editors (AEDEP) and the organization Fundamedios a forum titled “Freedom of Expression For All.” It is an open debate to which have been invited representatives of national and international human rights and press organizations, media, journalists and the public in general to come up with lines of action that will be recorded in a final document titled “Quito Commitments.”
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.
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