MIAMI, Florida (December 10, 2015)—The Inter American Press Association (IAPA) today described as "a harsh setback for freedom of expression in Ecuador" a constitutional amendment adopted last week that grants the government power to regulate information as if it were a public service.
Ecuador's National Assembly on December 3 approved a package of 15 amendments to the Constitution proposed by the Executive Branch, one of which describes information as "public service." This representation is already contemplated in the Communication Law, in effect since 2013, which is used by the government of President Rafael Correa as an instrument of pressure and censorship.
IAPA President Pierre Manigault, chairman of the Charleston, South Carolina, newspaper The Post and Courier, declared, "Once again the Ecuadorean government surprises us, applying one more turn of the screw against freedom of the press and of expression." He added that in this way the government of Ecuador "is claiming the legal authority and the power to grant or not the people's right to information, a human right that does not belong to the authority but to the people, as underscored in international principles such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and also the Declaration of Chapultepec."
Claudio Paolillo, chairman of the IAPA's Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information and editor of the Montevideo, Uruguay, weekly Búsqueda, said, "To give the government the power to determine that this is a public service, as an equivalent of other strategic services that could be water, electricity, health or public safety, clearly shows that the government claims as its right the possibility, for reasons of its entire convenience, to control information."
Paolillo added that with the amendment "Correa's government has simply wanted to give constitutional legitimacy to the Communication Law that itself did not have, as the degree of censorship applied by it is clearly an abuse of the Constitution and of the State of Law."
Thus the amendment underpins the communication policy of the Correa government boosted by the Communication Organic Law which, through surveillance bodies such as the Superintendence of Information and Communication (Supercom) controls, censors and intrudes on journalistic content, ordering heavy fines that force some media to cease operating.
The IAPA has also been denouncing the fact that this government policy in addition to being aggressive against critical and independent media is also used to expand the number of official media which are not used a public ones. Last week the official newspaper El Telégrafo purchased 49% of the shares of the company that publishes the Cuenca newspaper El Tiempo. In Ecuador, according to a study by the Ecuadorean non-governmental organization Fundamedios, as of March this year the list of media at the service of the government amounted to 27 in the government's control and one semi-official, and a network of more than 300 radio stations editorially aligned with the government.
In mid-September this year, during the Quito Commitment, a meeting organized by the IAPA and Fundamedios and held in the Ecuadorean capital which was attended by more than a dozen international organizations, the Correa government was asked to shelve this amendment due its being considered to be abusive of freedom of the press and of expression.
The IAPA also backed the opinion of Fundamedios, which described the constitutional amendment as "a serious setback to and violation of the right to freedom of expression."
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.
