TITLE:
Critical Analysis of Press Freedom in Nepal after the Peace Agreement 2006
AUTHORS:
Binod Kumar Paudel
KEYWORDS:
Press Freedom, Censorship, Journalist Safety, Nepal
JOURNAL NAME:
Advances in Journalism and Communication,
Vol.5 No.4,
October
19,
2017
ABSTRACT: A decade long civil war ended with a Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) in 2006. To address the political developments, the Interim Constitution was promulgated in 2007. Though the Interim Constitution of Nepal 2007 guarantees press freedom, every year various incidents of press freedom violation are recorded by various national and international organizations. This article evaluates the situation of press freedom in Nepal since the signing of CPA 2006 by analyzing all the incidents of press freedom violation from 2007 to 2014 as recorded by International Federation of Journalists (IFJ). The analysis of those events shows lack of sufficient evidence and information to justify them as the press freedom violation. No matter where and how the journalist or media owner is killed, threatened or harmed physically, it is termed as press freedom violation. The situation of Press freedom after peace agreement in 2006 is not that critical as projected in various reports and there is no government censorship in media. However, if the mechanism by which press freedom violation cases are recorded could be reviewed and more details are included, those reports will be much reliable. This tendency of reflecting critical situation of press freedom by projecting every incident without an adequate investigation might deviate from other issues related to journalist’s profession and further it might not motivate journalist and media to adhere to the code of ethics and become responsible to their profession. Though, the issue of professional safety of journalists could not be ignored, not all the incidents related to journalist are the cases of press freedom violation.