President Dr. Arif Alvi signed the Protection of Journalists and Media Professionals Bill into law on Wednesday (1st December), describing it as “historic legislation” for Pakistan.
People did not want their blunders to be disclosed, according to Dr. Alvi, therefore they put pressure on the media.
The bill aims to preserve journalists’ lives from harassment and torture and ensure their well-being by providing life and health insurance.
The President emphasized the importance of cultivating a culture of tolerance for journalists, who were merely performing their jobs of reporting and sharing information.
In his remarks at the signing ceremony, Federal Minister for Information Chaudhry Fawad Hussain stated that his government supported working journalists and that a portion of the Pakistani public tried to create the idea that the press was not free.
Furthermore, he said, “If there is no free press in Pakistan, then there will be no free press anywhere in the world. When it comes to press freedom, we compare ourselves not with the Third World and the Muslim World but with the First World.”
According to Chaudhry Fawad Hussain, Pakistan has more journalistic freedom than the first world because it does not have defamation legislation.
The Ministry of Human Rights developed the bill, and minister Dr. Shireen Mazari stated in her remarks that the new law was progressive in character and provided life and health insurance to journalists and media professionals.
Meanwhile, Reporters Without Borders (RSF), a global media watchdog, has slammed the inclusion of “an exceedingly unclear part” in a bill on journalist protection passed by the parliament earlier this month.
Section 6 of RSF of the law nullifies practically all of the protection it was designed to provide.
RSF said in a statement, “This section prohibits all journalists and media professionals from spreading ‘false information’ and producing material that ‘advocates hatred’ or constitutes ‘incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence’ – without clearly defining what any of these terms mean.”
