The AEJ has joined partners of the Council of Europe’s Platform on Safety of Journalists to call for authorities in the Irish Republic to improve protections for journalists and for decisive measures in Northern Ireland to end covert police surveillance of journalists there.
AEJ UK chair William Horsley joined the working visit of the Platform partners in Dublin on October 22 and 23 along with the CPJ, EFJ, IFJ, EBU, RSF, IPI, ECPMF, Index on Censorship, INSI, Justice for Journalists and PEN International to meet with journalists, representatives of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ), and government officials from the department of justice and the department of tourism, culture, arts, Gaeltacht, sport and media.
The partners’ statement raises concerns over delays to long-planned defamation law reforms in Ireland including strong anti-SLAPP provisions as well as safeguards for protecting journalists’ sources against warrants to hand materials over to police.
It noted that “without the necessary reforms, Ireland will be without adequate protections against abusive legal threats at a time when powerful actors, including politicians, are using defamation and the threat of defamation law to silence or intimidate journalists.”
The statement also expressed grave concern about the treatment of journalists and their sources in Northern Ireland, calling for an end to covert police surveillance – especially in the notorious Barry McCaffrey and Trevor Birney case which is the subject of hearings in the High Court by the Investigative Powers Tribunal — and the still unresolved murder of Martin O’Hagan in the province in 2001.
Because of the cross-border nature of such alleged surveillance and journalism, the CoE Platform partners called for Irish authorities to engage with their UK counterparts “to ensure that such flagrant abuses of press freedom are prevented in the future.”
Barry McCaffrey at CoE Platform meeting in Dublin
