The meeting, hosted by the Press Club of India, was attended by several members of the Indian Women’s Press Corps, Press Association, Working News Cameramen’s Association, Delhi Union of Journalists and the Indian Journalists’ Union
Several media veterans and organisations on Monday deplored the government’s targeting of journalists and discussed ways of providing free legal aid to those from the profession who lack the means to fight the cases registered against them over their work.
At a meeting at the Press Club of India, Business Standard chairperson T.N. Ninan proposed a fund to establish a network of lawyers to defend journalists.
“It is time for us to organise a legal aid fund to help individual journalists to fight the different cases they (face). Some of them have limited resources; in some cases organisations don’t support them and they deal with it with their personal resources and their families are in great difficulty.”
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Referring to the recent case against AltNews co-founder Mohammed Zubair, The Wire’s founding editor, Siddharth Varadarajan, underlined that the courts had granted remand although the period of limitation on the offences he was originally accused of had, under Section 468 of the Criminal Procedure Code, expired last year.
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Zubair was initially arrested under penal sections 153A (promoting enmity between different groups) and 295A (acts intended to outrage religious feelings) for a 2018 tweet that showed a still from a 1983 film. The police later added the charges of criminal conspiracy, destruction of evidence and alleged violation of the Foreign Contributions (Regulation) Act.
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Varadarajan added: “Alt News performs one of the most vital and crucial tasks of journalism, which is fact-checking…. Large sections of the media have abdicated that responsibility and allowed the free flow of misinformation and false news.
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The meeting, hosted by the Press Club of India, was attended by several members of the Indian Women’s Press Corps, Press Association, Working News Cameramen’s Association, Delhi Union of Journalists and the Indian Journalists’ Union.
A resolution adopted at the meeting said: “The plethora of FIRs against many of our colleagues in the recent past and ED raids (on) media offices send an ominous signal to the future of the profession as a whole…. On the other hand, those who actually make hate speeches are moving around freely.
Source: The Telegraph
