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Tag: Active Citizens

  • Caribbean-American Artist Depicts Chosen Family

    Caribbean-American Artist Depicts Chosen Family

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    Delvin Lugo at High Line Nine Galleries in NYC. Credit: A. McKenzie
    • by SWAN – Southern World Arts News (new york)
    • Inter Press Service

    NEW YORK, Oct 07 (IPS) – For two months over the summer, Caribbean-American artist Delvin Lugo presented his first solo show in New York City, exhibiting large, vibrant canvases at High Line Nine Galleries on Manhattan’s West Side and featuring queer communities in his homeland, the Dominican Republic.

    The exhibition, titled “Caribbean Summer”, pulled visitors in with its vivid colours and animated characters and also exemplified the success of alternative art events. The gallery space was provided by non-profit arts group Chashama, which describes itself as helping to “create a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive world by partnering with property owners to transform unused real estate”.

    These spaces – including galleries that normally close their doors for the summer – are used for “artists, small businesses, and for free community-centric art classes”. According to Lugo, the organisation’s assistance made his show possible and has also provided motivation to continue producing work.

    The 44-year-old artist said he’s particularly interested in portraying LGBTQ activists and in expanding his work to include more countries of the Caribbean. The following (edited) interview took place in Manhattan during the exhibition.

    SWAN: How did the show come about?

    DELVIN LUGO: So, this exhibition is a response to work that I was doing before. I had just finished a series that was about my childhood, growing up a young, gay man in the Dominican Republic, because I lived there until I was twelve years old. And I’d spent so much time kinda dealing with the past that it got to the point that I was like: you know what, I actually don’t know anything happening with the queer culture and the lives of people in DR right now. Yes, I do go back and visit, but when I go back, I go to see my relatives in the countryside, so this was a way to really educate myself and really connect with the queer community in the Dominican Republic. And in this case, it’s Santo Domingo that I’m focusing on.

    SWAN: What steps did you take to make the connections?

    DL: Well, I really started by reaching out to individuals on social media that maybe I’d seen stories written about, or things that caught my eye on Instagram… so, I reached out to them, and we kind of started a dialogue first. Then when I was ready to start painting, I decided to go meet them in person, and the theme that I had in mind was “chosen family”. I had a few ideas about what the situation was like there, but I really, really didn’t know.

    It wasn’t until I started meeting people and they started telling me that basically they had no rights… and so I wanted to focus on artists and activists – people I really admired, people that are doing the work and doing the fight. That’s really how it started. I went there, I told my contacts to bring their chosen family, and we hung out and took pictures, and I came back here and that’s how the paintings were formed, from all the information that I had. And I usually don’t just work from one picture, I do a collage of many photos, and then I paint from that collage.

    For two months over the summer, Caribbean-American artist Delvin Lugo presented his first solo show in New York City, exhibiting large, vibrant canvases at High Line Nine Galleries on Manhattan’s West Side and featuring queer communities in his homeland, the Dominican Republic
    Credit: A. McKenzie

    SWAN: So, there’s no painting that comes from just one photo?

    DL: Well, in some cases, I borrowed pictures from an association that hosts Gay Pride marches, and I used the people pictured, but I added myself, or the car, or different aspects. With these images, I was inspired by the spirit – the spirit of celebration, the spirit of individuality… and I kind of just worked around the image, adding myself as the driver and so on.

    SWAN: The paintings are super colourful, really striking – was that the intention from the start?

    DL: I’ve been working with vibrant colours recently, and I knew that it was gonna be very bright… the Caribbean is bright, colourful, and also I wanted to make the paint symbolize the heat, the climate in DR as well. It also feels like summer with the hot pink. But I really do know most of these individuals. Except for some young people in one picture, I know everyone, like Agatha, a trans woman and gay activist from the Bahamas who lives in the Dominican Republic.

    SWAN: Can you tell us about your own journey – have you always wanted to be an artist?

    DL: I did, you know. It was one of those things that when I was done with school, I really needed to work to survive, so I took jobs and somehow I was always able to get jobs in fashion, and that really kept me busy for a long time.

    For two months over the summer, Caribbean-American artist Delvin Lugo presented his first solo show in New York City, exhibiting large, vibrant canvases at High Line Nine Galleries on Manhattan’s West Side and featuring queer communities in his homeland, the Dominican Republic
    Credit: A. McKenzie

    SWAN: What did you do in fashion?

    DL: When I started, I did sales, like showroom wholesale, but most of the time I was working as a fashion stylist, being an assistant and then doing my own work. And that’s a fulltime job. Then slowly but surely, I started doing my own projects, like ink drawings, just things for myself, to be creative.

    And that developed into my drawing more and playing with oils, which is something I had done before. To get back into it, I went to continuing education classes. I needed to be reintroduced to oils because I’d forgotten so many techniques and things that you need to know.

    From then, I kept painting, praying for more time to work at it. Then Covid happened, I was let go from my job, and, in the beginning, I kept thinking that they might call me back any minute, and I truly worked around the clock on my painting for the first two months. The job didn’t call me back, but at that point it was great because by then I’d got used to an everyday practice. I can tell you that from the beginning of 2020 to even now, the way that I’ve seen my work grow and even the way that I think, and the way that I approach painting, it has been quite a learning experience.

    SWAN: So, this is your first real solo show?

    DL: Yeah, it really is. I’ve done a number of group shows, but this opportunity came with Chashama and I applied for it. I was already working on all these pieces, so this was the right time. It’s an introduction to my work, it’s not like a full solo show in a way.

    SWAN: How long have you lived in New York?

    DL: So, my family left DR in 1990, when I was twelve, and we lived in Rhode Island and then I made my way to New York in ’97 and I’ve been here ever since.

    SWAN: Where next, with the art?

    DL: I want to continue painting, because it’s such a privilege to have a studio, to have a full-time practice, and I really do want to continue that. I’ve been painting from home up until October last year, and when I got my first studio – even though it’s the size of this table here – I couldn’t wait to get to the studio.

    I was there to do my own thing. Still, I actually get annoyed when people tell me: “Oh, it must be so wonderful, you’re in your studio, doing your art…” It is great, but it’s also really frustrating because I’m hitting my head against the wall many a day, or leaving angry because something didn’t go right. It’s a fight.

    So, for me, it’s truly just to continue creating, to continue painting, following my instincts, following the stories. I really want to continue in the same path of representing and bringing a focus to the LGBTQ community, not just in DR, but in any other parts of the world. I think it would be an interesting project actually to go elsewhere to meet the queer culture and showing them in the painting, even like in other places in the Caribbean, like Puerto Rico, Cuba, Jamaica. That would be really interesting. – AM / SWAN

    © Inter Press Service (2022) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service

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  • Small Farmers in Peru Combat Machismo to Live Better Lives

    Small Farmers in Peru Combat Machismo to Live Better Lives

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    On the suspension bridge that crosses the Vilcanota River, in the village of Secsencalla, in the Andes highlands region of Cuzco, Peru, a group of men who have been taking steps towards a new form of masculinity without machismo pose for a photo. From left to right: Saul Huamán, Rolando Tito, Hilario Quispe and Brian Junior Quispe. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS
    • by Mariela Jara (cuzco, peru)
    • Inter Press Service

    CUZCO, Peru, Oct 06 (IPS) – “My father was very ‘machista’, he used to beat my mother… It was a very sad life,” said Dionisio Ticuña, a resident of the rural community of Canincunca, on the outskirts of the town of Huaro, in the southern Peruvian highlands region of Cuzco more than 3,000 meters above sea level.

    Today, at 66 years of age, he is happy that he managed to not copy the model of masculinity that his father showed him, in which being a man was demonstrated by exercising power and violence over women and children.

    “Now I am an enemy of the ‘wife beaters’, I don’t hang out with the ones who were raised that way and I don’t pay attention to the taunts or ugly things they might say to me,” he said in an interview with IPS in his new adobe house, which he built in 2020 and where he lives with his wife and their youngest daughter, 20. Their three other children, two boys and a girl, have already become independent.

    In this South American country of 33 million people, tolerance of violence, particularly gender-based violence, is high, and there is a strong division of roles within couples.

    A nationwide survey on social relationships, conducted in 2019 by the governmental National Institute of Statistics and Informatics (INEI), showed that 52 percent of women believed they should first fulfill their role as mothers and wives before pursuing their dreams, 33 percent believed that if they were unfaithful they should be punished by their husband, and 27 percent said they deserved to be punished if they disrespected their husband.

    The survey also found that a high proportion of Peruvians agreed with the physical punishment of children. Of those interviewed, 46 percent thought it was a parental right and 34 percent believed it helped discipline children so they would not become lazy.

    Katherine Pozo, a Cuzco lawyer with the rural development program of the Flora Tristán Peruvian Women’s Center, told IPS that masculinity in Peru, particularly in rural areas, is still very machista or sexist.

    “The ideas acquired in childhood and transmitted from generation to generation are that men have power over women, that women owe them obedience, and that women’s role is to take care of their men and take care of the home and the family. This thinking is an obstacle to the integral experience of their masculinities and to the recognition of women’s rights,” she said in an interview at her home in Cuzco, the regional capital.

    Dionisio Ticuña, a resident of the rural community of Canincunca, in the Andean region of Cuzco in southern Peru, stands in front of his new adobe house, built in 2020. At the age of 66, he has achieved the tranquility of a life without machismo, which he experienced as a child in his family. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS
    Dionisio Ticuña, a resident of the rural community of Canincunca, in the Andean region of Cuzco in southern Peru, stands in front of his new adobe house, built in 2020. At the age of 66, he has achieved the tranquility of a life without machismo, which he experienced as a child in his family. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

    Based on that analysis the Center decided to involve men in the work they do in rural communities in Cuzco to help women exercise their rights and have greater autonomy in making decisions about their lives, promoting the approach to a new kind of masculinity among men.

    In 2018 the Center launched this process, convinced that it was necessary to raise awareness among men about gender equality so that women’s efforts to break down discrimination could flourish. The project will continue until next year and is supported by two Spanish institutions: the Basque Agency for Development Cooperation and Muguen Gainetik.

    IPS visited different Quechua indigenous villages in Cuzco´s Andes highlands to talk to farmers who are working to shed gender prejudices and beliefs that, they acknowledge, have brought them unhappiness. Now, they are gradually taking significant steps with the support of the Center, which is working to generate a new view of masculinity in these communities.

    “I have been married to my wife Delia for 35 years, we have raised our children and I can say that you feel great peace when you learn to respect your partner and to show your innermost emotions,” said Ticuña, a participant in the initiative.

    “Being head of household is hard, but it doesn’t give me the right to mistreat. I decided not to be like my father and to be a different kind of person in order to lead a happy life with her and our children,” he said, sitting at the entrance to his home in Canincunca.

    Hilario Quispe, a farmer from the Secsencalla farming community in the town of Andahuaylillas, in the Peruvian highlands region of Cuzco, poses for a photo with his wife Hilaria Mena. For him it was a revelation to understand that the tasks she performs at home are work, and his commitment now is to share them. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS
    Hilario Quispe, a farmer from the Secsencalla farming community in the town of Andahuaylillas, in the Peruvian highlands region of Cuzco, poses for a photo with his wife Hilaria Mena. For him it was a revelation to understand that the tasks she performs at home are work, and his commitment now is to share them. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

    Recognizing that women do work

    Hilario Quispe, a 49-year-old farmer from the Secsencalla community in the town of Andahuaylillas, told IPS that in his area there is a great deal of machismo.

    In his home, at 3100 meters above sea level, he said that he has been able to understand that women also work when they are at home.

    “Actually, they do more than men, we have only one job, but they wash, cook, weave, take care of the children, look after the animals, go out to the fields…And I used to say: my wife doesn’t work,” he reflected.

    Because of the distribution of tasks based on stereotyped gender roles, women spend more time than men on unremunerated care tasks in the household.

    INEI reported in 2021 that in the different regions of the country, Peruvian women have a greater overall workload than men because the family responsibilities fall on their shoulders.

    In rural areas, women work an average of 76 hours per week, 47 of which are in unpaid activities involving work in the home, both caring for their families and their crops.

    In the case of men, their overall workload is 64 hours per week, most of which, 44 hours, are devoted to paid work.

    Saúl Huamán is a family farmer in the rural community of Secsencalla. He recognizes that machismo is still a daily reality in Peru’s Andes highlands regions, but he strives to demonstrate day by day that he can be different and can achieve a life based on respect with his partner and their six-month-old son, Luas. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS
    Saúl Huamán is a family farmer in the rural community of Secsencalla. He recognizes that machismo is still a daily reality in Peru’s Andes highlands regions, but he strives to demonstrate day by day that he can be different and can achieve a life based on respect with his partner and their six-month-old son, Luas. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

    Breaking down stereotypes

    Pozo, with the Flora Tristán Center, cited data from the official report that found that in the countryside, married women spend 17 hours a week in kitchen activities and men only four; in housekeeping seven and their partners three; and in childcare 11 and their husbands seven.

    Quispe, who with his wife, Hilaria Mena, has four children between the ages of six and 17, said it was a revelation to understand that the different activities his wife performs at home are work.

    “If she wasn’t there, everything would fall apart. But I am not going to wait for that to happen, I am committed to stop being machista. Those ideas that have been put in our minds as children do not help us have a good life,” he remarked.

    The department of Cuzco is a Peruvian tourist area, where the Inca citadel of Machu Picchu is the main attraction. It has more than 1.3 million inhabitants, of which 40 percent live in rural areas where agriculture is one of the main activities. Much of it is subsistence farming, which requires the participation of the different members of the family.

    This is precisely the case of the Secsencalla farming community, where, although the new generations have made it to higher education, they are still tied to the land.

    Rolando Tito sits next to his mother Faustina Ocsa. He believes that men can experience their masculinity differently, without machismo or violence, with equal relationships with women. The university student is also actively involved in agricultural work in his rural village of Secsencalla, in the Andean region of Cuzco, in southern Peru. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS
    Rolando Tito sits next to his mother Faustina Ocsa. He believes that men can experience their masculinity differently, without machismo or violence, with equal relationships with women. The university student is also actively involved in agricultural work in his rural village of Secsencalla, in the Andean region of Cuzco, in southern Peru. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

    Rolando Tito, 25, is in his third year of systems engineering at the National University of Cuzco, and helps his mother, Faustina Ocsa, 64, with the agricultural work.

    “I want to better myself and continue helping my mother, she is a widow and although she was unable to study, she always encouraged me to do so. Times are no longer like hers when women didn’t have opportunities, but there are still men who think they should stay in the kitchen,” he told IPS, with his Quechua-speaking mother at his side.

    Sitting by the entrance to the community’s bodega, which is often used as a center for meetings and gatherings, with the help of a translator, his mother recalled that she experienced a lot of violence, that fathers were not supportive of their daughters and that they mistreated their wives. And she said she hoped that her son would be a good man who would not follow in the footsteps of the men who came before him.

    “I have learned about equality between men and women,” her son said. “For example, I am helping in the house, I am cooking and washing, that does not make me less of a man, and when I have a partner I will not have the idea that she has to serve me. Together we will work in the house and on the farm.”

    The same sentiment was expressed by Saúl Huamán, 35, who has become a father for the first time with his baby Luas, six months old.

    “Now I have to worry about three mouths to feed. I used to be a machine operator but now I only work in the fields and I have to work hard to make it profitable. With my wife Sonia we share the chores, while she cooks I watch the baby, and I am also learning to prepare meals,” he says as his smiling wife listens.

    Pozo the attorney recognized that it is not easy to change cultural patterns so strongly rooted in the communities, but said that it is not impossible.

    “It is like sowing the seed of equality, you have to water and nurture it, and then harvest the fruits, which is a better life for women and men,” she said.

    © Inter Press Service (2022) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service

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  • Women in Argentine Slum Confront Violence Together

    Women in Argentine Slum Confront Violence Together

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    Women gather at the Punto Violeta, a center where different government agencies and social organisations seek to address the gender-based violence suffered by women in the Padre Mugica neighborhood, or Villa 31, a shantytown in Argentina’s capital city. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS
    • by Daniel Gutman (buenos aires)
    • Inter Press Service

    BUENOS AIRES, Oct 04 (IPS) – The Padre Carlos Mugica neighborhood looks like another city within the Argentine capital, which most people usually see from up above as they drive past on the freeway but have never visited. It is a shantytown in the heart of Buenos Aires, of enormous vitality and where women are organizing to confront the various forms of violence that affect them.

    “I have a history of gender violence. And what I found here is that many other women have experienced similar situations in their lives,” says Graciela, seated at the table of the weekly Women’s Meeting, in a small locale in the most modern sector of the neighborhood, called Punto Violeta, which has become a reference point for victims of violence.

    Traditionally known in Buenos Aires as Villa 31 and home to more than 40,000 inhabitants, the neighborhood’s name honors a Catholic priest and activist who worked with poor families, who was killed during the 1976-1983 military dictatorship.

    The slum is located on more than 70 hectares of publicly owned railway land just a few minutes from the center of the capital and separated by the train tracks from Recoleta, one of the city’s most upscale neighborhoods. Families started to occupy the area 90 years ago and the shantytown grew as a result of the successive crises that hit the Argentine economy and with the influx of poor immigrants from Paraguay, Bolivia and Peru.

    Different governments have tried to eradicate the slum throughout its history, but in recent years the official view of the neighborhood has changed. Today Villa 31 is halfway through a slow and laborious process of urbanization and integration into Buenos Aires that the city government launched in 2015.

    Thus, it has become a strange place, which mixes hope for a better future with the social woes of poverty and overcrowding.

    There are wide streets with public transport and modern concrete housing blocks where once there was only a total absence of the state. But there are also still many narrow, dark passageways, where precarious brick and sheet metal houses up to four stories high seem on the verge of crumbling on top of each other.

    View of one of the passageways in the Padre Mugica neighborhood, a slum located in the heart of Buenos Aires. The process of regularizing the informal settlement and integrating it with the city began in 2015, but it is only halfway done and narrow passageways lined with precarious housing coexist with modern roads and buildings. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS
    View of one of the passageways in the Padre Mugica neighborhood, a slum located in the heart of Buenos Aires. The process of regularizing the informal settlement and integrating it with the city began in 2015, but it is only halfway done and narrow passageways lined with precarious housing coexist with modern roads and buildings. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

    The struggle for a better life

    Graciela, who became a single mother at 18 and now has six children she has had to raise on her own, says she lived in the western province of Santa Fe and decided to move to Buenos Aires in search of a better life, after an accident at work in which she lost a hand. “In order to get a disability pension, I had to be here,” she explains. That’s how she ended up in Villa 31.

    She says that this year her ex-partner tried to kill her, cutting her neck several times with a knife, so today she has a panic button given to her by the police.

    She shares the things that happen to her at the Women’s Meeting every Wednesday, a space where collective solutions are sought for complicated lives, marked by economic difficulties, overcrowded housing, interrupted studies, lack of opportunities, families with conflicts and a permanent struggle to get ahead.

    “It is a weekly meeting where we invite all the women of the neighborhood and we work on emotional strength as a preventive strategy against violence. Sometimes women start to feel that what they experience at home is normal,” says Carolina Ferro, a psychologist of the Women’s Encounter Program of the Undersecretariat of Public Safety and Order of the Buenos Aires Ministry of Justice and Security.

    Ferro explains that the goal is to bolster the self-esteem of the women victims of violence. “Once they are empowered, they can go out to work to become economically independent or go back to school. We help them to be themselves,” she says during the last meeting in September, in which IPS was allowed to participate.

    “This is part of a comprehensive care project. We centralize the care at the Punto Violeta because, although the violence here is no different from that in other parts of the city, many women find it difficult to leave the neighborhood because they don’t know how,” she adds.

    Graciela, a mother of six children whom she has had to raise on her own, is one of the participants in the Punto Violeta in Padre Mugica, where women come together to find solutions to the violence they have experienced and to empower themselves to improve their lives, those of their families and the community. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS
    Graciela, a mother of six children whom she has had to raise on her own, is one of the participants in the Punto Violeta in Padre Mugica, where women come together to find solutions to the violence they have experienced and to empower themselves to improve their lives, those of their families and the community. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

    When the psychologist asks the women what has been the greatest achievement in their lives, excited responses emerge. One says, “Raising my children on my own”; another says, “Going back to school as an adult, and graduating”; and another says, “Having stopped working as a house cleaner to open my own little salon where I do therapeutic massage.”

    “This is the first time in my life that I have spoken to a psychologist,” says one of the participants in the meeting, who is anguished because her son, whom she dreamed would become a university graduate and professional, dropped out of school. The group coordinator and her fellow participants insist on the need not to place expectations on another person, whose life cannot be controlled, in order to avoid frustration.

    Unceasing violence

    In 2021, in this South American country of 45 million people, 251 women were killed by gender violence, an average of one murder every 35 hours, according to the National Registry of Femicides, kept by the Supreme Court of Justice since 2015. In 88 percent of the cases, the victim knew her aggressor, and in 39 percent she lived with him. In 62 percent of the cases she was killed by her partner or ex-partner.

    The Supreme Court has been conducting the survey since 2015 and the figures have not varied much, with approximately 20 percent of femicides in the city of Buenos Aires committed in shantytowns and slums. In any case, during 2020, the most critical year of the COVID-19 pandemic, calls to emergency numbers increased fivefold.

    Aerial view of the Padre Mugica neighborhood, or Villa 31, as many still call it, with downtown Buenos Aires in the background. The 90-year-old informal settlement now straddles a freeway and has more than 40,000 inhabitants, just minutes from the heart of the Argentine capital. CREDIT: City of Buenos Aires
    Aerial view of the Padre Mugica neighborhood, or Villa 31, as many still call it, with downtown Buenos Aires in the background. The 90-year-old informal settlement now straddles a freeway and has more than 40,000 inhabitants, just minutes from the heart of the Argentine capital. CREDIT: City of Buenos Aires

    It was precisely during the pandemic that the Punto Violeta was born, as a government response to a longstanding concrete demand in the neighborhood for a women’s center.

    “When the pandemic began and mobility restrictions were imposed, it was a very difficult time in the neighborhood, when some local women told us that we should not forget the women victims of violence, who had been locked in their homes with their aggressors,” Bárbara Bonelli, deputy ombudsperson in the Buenos Aires city government and a driving force behind the creation of the center, told IPS.

    Punto Violeta is the name given in Argentina and other countries to spaces designed to promote the defense of the rights of women and sexual minorities, in which public agencies work together with social organizations.

    The program in Mugica involves several public agencies, which take turns on different days of the week, with the mission of providing a comprehensive approach to the problem of violence.

    At the center victims can file a criminal complaint of gender violence with representatives of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, obtain a protection measure or gain access to psychological care or a social worker.

    “Punto Violeta was created to respond to a demand that existed in the neighborhood. I would say that the problem of violence against women is no different in poor neighborhoods, but it does need to be addressed at a local level,” says Bonelli.

    “Since it is very difficult for them to leave the neighborhood, the state did not reach these women. We hope that the Punto Violeta will contribute to the effective insertion of women from the neighborhood in terms of employment, education, finance, economic and social issues,” she adds.

    © Inter Press Service (2022) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service

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  • Journalists, Under Threat, Need Safe Refuge Through Special Emergency Visas

    Journalists, Under Threat, Need Safe Refuge Through Special Emergency Visas

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    • Opinion by Gypsy Guillen Kaiser (new york)
    • Inter Press Service

    NEW YORK, Oct 04 (IPS) – “This woman sitting next to me, Maria Ressa, is a Nobel laureate and a convicted criminal,” said barrister Amal Clooney, who co-leads the international legal team representing Ressa. The founder of news website Rappler, Ressa has been targeted with a barrage of legal charges intended to stop her journalism in the Philippines.

    During a conversation hosted by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly high-level week, which concluded September 26, Clooney revealed that Ressa faces the possibility of imminent imprisonment in the Philippines.

    “The only thing standing between her and a prison cell is one decision from the Philippines Supreme Court that could come as soon as in 21 days’ time,” said Clooney to an audience of news leaders, diplomats, and advocates.

    She then appealed for prosecutors to drop the baseless charges and for newly elected President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to issue a pardon. In May, CPJ wrote to Marcos requesting that he urgently take concrete steps to undo former President Rodrigo Duterte’s long campaign of intimidation and harassment of the press.

    The conversation, led by CPJ President Jodie Ginsberg, also explored the broader misuse of laws increasingly deployed to silence the press across the world. Clooney and Ressa are both past recipients of CPJ’s Gwen Ifill Press Freedom award for their extraordinary and sustained achievement in the cause of press freedom.

    UNGA week also served to gather legal experts, diplomats, and activists to discuss the plight of journalists forced to flee their homes and the responsibility of governments to provide safe refuge through special emergency visas.

    During a high-level side-event hosted by the Czech Republic, CPJ’s Ginsberg joined Czech Foreign Minister Jan Lipavsky and deputy chairs of the High Level Panel of Legal Experts on Media Freedom to make the case for these visas.

    CPJ has advocated for such visas in the past in line with recommendations by members of the Media Freedom Coalition, a group of 52 governments that support press freedom.

    Ginsberg’s message: Governments must create special emergency visas for journalists to allow them to quickly evacuate and relocate to safety. The visas should be granted to individuals who are at risk due to their work keeping the public informed.

    As Ginsberg noted, across the world, from Afghanistan to Nicaragua and Belarus to Myanmar, CPJ has worked on hundreds of cases of such journalists seeking safe refuge. There is no time to waste.

    Journalists forced to flee often try to continue reporting in exile. Panelist Roman Anin, an exiled investigative journalist who runs news website iStories, shared his story of moving his newsroom out of Russia.

    “When the war started, we had a choice between three options, either stay in Russia and stop our work, stay in Russia, continue our work and end up in jail, or relocate the newsroom,” he said. Anin said that in spite of the hardship of the relocation, his newsroom has been able to reach Russian audiences with stories on alleged war crimes committed in Ukraine.

    Anin’s experience, and CPJ’s own work helping many other displaced journalists, demonstrate how critical it is for governments to prioritize emergency visas for swift relocation and safety. Refusing to do so not only impacts the lives of individual journalists, it is a blow to free expression and access to information globally.

    In solidarity,

    Gypsy Guillén Kaiser is CPJ Advocacy and Communications Director.

    IPS UN Bureau


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    © Inter Press Service (2022) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service

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