Solidarity with Belarus Journalists

GAMAG Europe, the European alliance for gender equality in media, expresses its strong solidarity with all Belarus journalists, regardless their media or political position, and our special concern with violence against women journalists in this country and everywhere.

According to the Belarusian Union of Journalists (BUJ), the Bielorussian Association of Journalists (BAJ), and other International organizations focused on press freedom and human rights, already 151 journalists have been detained in the country, some of them international correspondents, and 400 have been harassed and intimidated in the frame of the current political and civil conflict in the country, in Minsk and other Belarus cities since August.

We join calls of International and European Federations of Journalists and other professional organizations to assure freedom of expression in the country and everywhere and to stop the prosecutions against journalists and media workers, as well as to allow them to do their job and cover all the events freely. We specially call for the use of a non-hostile and non-sexist language in media and the respect to a professional code of ethics.

We call Belarus authorities, European institutions as well as international organisations and civil society to defend the press freedom and the right to information as basic human rights.

GE is shocked by the death of Ebru Timtik.

GAMAG EUROPE (GE) is shocked by the death of the Turkish-Kurdish lawyer, Ebru Timtik, a symbol of the struggle for human rights, after 238 days of hunger strike in a Turkish prison that she decided to pursue in order to demand a fair trial.

Timtik, who died on August 28, was sentenced to more than 13 years of prison along with 17 lawyers from the left-wing association “People’s Legal Office” (Halkın Hukuk Bürosu), a lawyers’ association that defends human rights. and that it is considered a terrorist organization by the Turkish law. Timtik is the fourth person in the DHKP-C who dies this year as a result of a “death fast.”

GAMAG EUROPE, the European alliance for gender equality in the media, condemns the deterioration of human rights in Turkey and the lack of freedoms, as well as the deficiencies of the judiciary system in this country. We also claim the EU and other international authorities to investigate and condemn these attacks against human rights.

Violence against women journalists

GAMAG’s submission to the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women in contribution to the report to be presented to the UN Human Rights Council in June 2020.