Sydney PEN condemns Fiji's oppressive new media laws — 12.07.2010
In April, Fiji’s military leader, Frank Bainimarama, declared that Fiji’s media outlets must be 90% locally owned. It is decreed that this must happen within three months, forcing the country’s largest newspaper, The Fiji Times, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Ltd, to close or sell immediately.
Bainimarama’s Media Industry Development Decree was released in April, cementing of the censorship program that has shadowed Fiji’s media since the military leadership commandeered Fiji’s constitution in April 2009.
The Fiji Times has remained an exception to that pressure, and it is believed that the Decree is aimed particularly at curbing its criticism of Fiji’s leadership and frustration of government censorship. The paper receives no government advertising and does not run government press releases without editorial intervention. The Fijian government deported The Fiji Times’ publisher, Evan Hannah, and the CEO of The Fiji Sun in 2008. Since then The Fiji Times has continued to frustrate the government by highlighting the deportation of the ABC’s Sean Dorney in 2009, and by running white space where government censorship has been enforced upon content.
The government’s new Decree states that organisations that publish material deemed by the authority to be “against the public interest or order, against national interest, offends against good taste or decency, or creates communal discord” are liable to a fine of up to $279,000, and journalists to prison for up to five years, penalties widely attached to all the decree’s provisions. As well as declaring a majority percentage of Fijian media ownership, the Decree also states that a media tribunal, chaired by a person qualified to be a judge, will hear complaints made to a media development authority. There will be no recourse to the courts and conventional rules of evidence will not apply. Any broadcaster or publisher must submit to the media authority’s minister in advance all material that may be deemed to “give rise to disorder” or undermine the government.
Sydney PEN joins Stephen Smith, the New Zealand government, Amnesty International and other civil society organisations and regional voices that have spoken out against the Decree and its impact on freedom of information and freedom of expression in Fiji. Download our media statement on this issue.