Kinshasa (AFP)
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and its local partner, Journaliste en danger (JED), on Friday pleaded for the reform of a law "riddled with custodial sanctions" that governs the press in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
These two NGOs are asking for "the establishment of a mechanism dedicated to the protection of journalists", in a statement issued after an outreach mission to parliamentarians and members of the government.
"The current law on freedom of the press is riddled with custodial sentences of up to the death penalty," AFP Secretary-General Tshivis Tshivuadi told AFP.
"We propose to amend certain provisions of this law, including sanctions on defamation and damaging imputations that push journalists to self-censorship," he said.
Dated 1996, the current press law "does not take into account the advent of online media, and these new media are not yet regulated in the DRC," Tshivuadi said.
"In order for the legislation to change and for this historic reform, which has been awaited for more than twenty years, to succeed, it is essential that there be a strong political will on the part of the executive but also that elected representatives be very actively involved", says Arnaud Froger, head of RSF's Africa office.
Despite a "slight inflection of attacks on press freedom" since President Felix Tshisekedi came to power in early 2019, "the level of abuses remains worrying," say RSF and JED.
Since the beginning of the year, "79 attacks on freedom of the press have been registered by JED including 15 arrests and 13 cases of aggression," according to these NGOs.
"The speeches are encouraging but the reforms are still waiting," they say.
On the day of his inauguration in January, the new head of state Felix Tshisekedi promised to make the media "a real fourth power" in the DRC, a country ranked in the 154th place out of 180 of the RSF rankings for freedom of the press in 2019.
© 2019 AFP