Free press in danger

By Lola Keilani

The law identifies 14 off-limit areas, which include ideas, opinions and cartoons which might be considered harmful to relations with friendly or Islamic or Arab states. In addition to being fined, a journalist could also be jailed if he/she ventures onto such forbidden ground.

"If we publish a report on human rights violations by Israel in the West Bank, the newspaper will be shut down, will have to pay compensation and its licence could be revoked," said Taher Edwan, chief-editor of Arab Al-Youm daily newspaper.

The new draft law also prohibits newspapers from publishing political ideas/opinion/position pieces by professional associations, charitable societies and cultural forums, particularly those which are opposed to normalisation of ties with Israel.

"From now on, newspapers will be filled with stories of ministers receiving delegations. That is the only thing they will be allowed to report on," wrote Fahed Al-Fank, a well-known columnist commenting on the draft.

If the draft is endorsed by the Jordanian Parliament, the 13 weekly newspapers have threatened to shut down, saying that no worthy news will be available for publishing.

The draft law, which the government claims "lifts the ceiling of freedom," has infuriated journalists, think-tanks and civil society institutions.

"If this law is passed, there will be no new newspapers, and the existing ones will die," said Fouad Hassan, a Jordan Press Association board member.

The law gives the Council of Ministers the right to deny licences to new newspapers, and to waive their right to appeal the council's decision to the Higher Court of Justice -- a right enshrined in the earlier 1993 PPL. It also raises the minimum capital requirement for daily newspapers from $75,000 to $1.5 million, and for weeklies from $22,000 to $450,000. Dailies and weeklies are now required to deposit a bank guarantee of $150,000 and $75,000 respectively in the Ministry of Information accounts, to ensure immediate payments of fines incurred.

"Not only will the law freeze our papers' capital, but as a weekly, we simply cannot come up with this sum of money. Therefore, we will be forced to shut down," said Nidal Mansour, editor of Al-Hadath weekly newspaper.

The draft law includes an article which gives the director of the Press and Publication Department (PPD) the right to ask the court to suspend publication of newspapers being sued by the department within 24 hours, if he sees fit.

"The proposed law infringes on the rights of the judiciary by asking them to pass a verdict of suspension before hearing the journalists' defence," said Musa Keilani, publisher of Al-Urdun weekly. Keilani added that "now, a newspaper can be shut down before the court's final ruling. If the court finds, at a later stage, that the publication did not violate the law, and the journalists are acquitted, the law does not grant the publication financial compensation for its losses during the closure period, which could be between two and three years in many press cases."

Columnist Sultan Hattab wrote that "this law considers journalists guilty before they are proven innocent, and not the other way round."

The draft law also grants the director of the PPD the authority to monitor local and foreign publications, research institutions, publishing houses, polling centres, bookstores, translation offices and advertising bureaus. A research or polling centre could be shut down if it receives funding from non-Jordanian organisations. When submitting the draft to parliament last week, the government tried to justify it by claiming that the law was necessary for several reasons.

"The newspapers which were established under the 1993 Law often projected negative images of Jordan, some exploiting loopholes in the former law, thus causing harm and offence to the Kingdom, and damaging Jordan's relations with Arab and friendly nations," said a spokesman for the Jordanian government. "These reports have had negative repercussions for our country and our economic relations with other adjacent states that import Jordanian products. The loopholes in the 1993 Law were responsible for that state of chaos."

Although the government maintained that the deputies will have the final say regarding the proposed law, Prime Minister Abdul-Salam Majali has been meeting with the various parliamentary blocs, lobbying publicly and privately to promote his ideas.

Salah Qallab, a columnist, wrote that the government has tried to win over the deputies' support for the law by pressuring them. "If parliament endorses the law, this will be a scandalous failure for an institution which should represent the Jordanian people."

Journalists are not optimistic that parliament will amend the restrictions and constraints imposed by the proposed law for two main reasons: the shortage of opposition deputies in parliament, and the fact that this parliament has had a long history of strong agreement with the prime minister.