Caricom leaders must confront their regional counterparts on human rights violations such as the withdrawal by the Guyana Government of advertisements from Stabroek News, the newspaper’s Editor Anand Persaud told a press freedom seminar in Jamaica on Thursday.
Persaud made a presentation on the press freedom situation in Guyana and the ban by the government on state advertisements in the Stabroek News. The `Press Freedom and Corruption Prevention Seminar’ was organized by the Media Association of Jamaica in association with the Jamaica Chamber of Commerce and the Private Sector Organi-sation of Jamaica. President Bharrat Jagdeo had been invited to attend the seminar but sent his regrets.
In his presentation, Persaud said that for too long Caricom leaders had avoided challenging their fellow political leaders and in Guyana’s case specifically this had allowed years of electoral rigging to take place unhindered.
“We cannot be a real community of nations with shared values” if we neglect to take on board issues such as the denial of press freedom, he said. The Editor pointed out that a year after the withdrawal of the ads the Guyana Government has failed to present a case before the local and international community. This failure, he said, exposed the opaqueness and arbitrariness in decision making by the government and was a development that was very troubling.
He said the antipathy that had been shown towards Stabroek News was reflected in the rejection by President Jagdeo of a reasonable proposal that had been made by a distinguished team of regional media practitioners to help devise a mechanism for the apportioning of state ads. He said the President had also rejected an eminently reasonable offer by Stabroek News for ads to be shared on the basis of paid, audited circulation and the target audience for each newspaper. More-over, despite promises, the government had failed to respond to a request by the press freedom rapporteur for the Inter American Commission on Human Rights to explain the basis for the withdrawal of ads. This stance by the government, Persaud said, exposed the vacuousness of its case.
“When elected governments become uncaring of whether their decisions were right or wrong and if they were properly made
