Observing World Press Freedom Day in Liberia

IREX partnered with the Press Union of Liberia (PUL), UNESCO and the United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) to mark the 19th anniversary of World Press Freedom Day, a day that honors the achievements and bravery of the men and women who call themselves journalists.

Using the global World Press Freedom Day theme, New Voices: Media Freedom Helping to Transform Societies 115 participants from Liberia, Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast came together to assess the level of press freedom in the region and discuss the important role of the media in the reconstruction process in each of the three countries. Liberia, Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast are post conflict countries, and participants stressed the need for the media to remain free and independent as a recipe for avoiding a return to conflict.

At the conference Liberia’s Information Minister, Lewis Brown announced that President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf intends to embrace The Table Mountain Declaration, which calls on African governments to abolish criminal defamation or libel laws that negatively impact the work of journalists. He said the president will consult her legal team in the coming days to prepare a bill to be presented to the legislature to repeal Liberia’s criminal libel law. The representative of Sierra Leone’s Ministry of Information, E. Kwame Yankson said the Sierra Leonean Parliament will pass the Freedom of Information Act by the second week of May.

Other World Press Freedom Day activities included hundreds of journalists parading through the streets of Monrovia and a debate between students from two of Liberia’s leading universities on the importance of the Freedom of Information Law. The celebrations culminated in the Press Union’s annual awards dinner where IREX partner Heritage was named the Best Newspaper of the Year and Fabine Kwiah, an IREX trainee, was named Women's Rights Reporter of the Year among other journalists recognized for their work.

Each year, May 3rd is observed as World Press Freedom Day. The United Nations set aside that day to celebrate the principles of press freedom and honor those who have died in pursuit of that freedom.