Attacks on Media
IJU condemns murder of Mumbai journalist; Concerned over spate of murders and assaults
18 Jul, 2015The Indian Journalists Union (UU) strongly condemned the murder of yet another journalist Raghavendra Dubey and brutal assault on two other journalists in Mumbai on Friday, 17 July and expressed its serious concern over the spate of killings and brutal assaults on journalists in the country in the last two months. This came in the wake of a brutal assault a day earlier in the city, on a women journalist, Manashree Pathak of a Marathi news channel, on Thursday when she was covering the incident of cylinder blast killing four people.
Raghavendra Dubey, who edits a local weekly, was found dead within minutes after he left the police station where he questioned the police on the brutal attack on two journalists, Santosh Mishra and Shashi Sharma, while covering a police raid on an orchestra bar in the suburbs of the metropolis early Friday.
In a statement issued here on Saturday, July 18, IJU President S N Sinha, Secretary-General Devulapalli Amar, Press Council of India (PCI) members K Amarnath and Prabhat Dash said it was a matter of grave concern that in the last one and half month three journalists, Jagendra Singh in Uttar Pradesh, Sandeep Kothari in Madhya Pradesh and Raghavendra Dubey in Mumbai were killed and another eleven journalists were brutally assaulted in the various parts of the country.
The lJU leaders said frequent murders of and assaults on journalists in the country raised serious doubts over the safety of journalists in the country. “We urge upon the union government to immediately enact a special legislation on safety of journalists providing for speedy investigation and trail by a special court on day to day basis, as recommended by a sub-committee of the Press Council of India (PCI) recently”.
“The legislation should treat all assaults on working journalists as cognizable and non-bailable offence. The investigation should be led by an officer not below the rank of a superintendent of police under the close watch and monitoring of Chairman of the Press Council of India. It also should provide for adequate compensation to the families of the slain journalists,” they said.
They called on the Chairman of the PCI to take steps to immediately draft a legislation in consultation with eminent lawyers for safety of journalists on the lines recommended by the Committee on Safety of Journalists present it to the union government for enactment.
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