- MADA presented its experience on RTI in workshop in Jericho
MADA General Director Mr. Mousa Rimawi presented MADA’s experience in the drafting and advocating of a Right to Information draft law in cooperation with other civil society organizations, governmental organizations, journalists, and legal and media experts in workshop held with the Coalition for Accountability and Integrity (AMAN) in cooperation with the legal clinic of the Palestinian academy for security science (Al-Istiqlal university) in in Jericho city. He emphasized the need to enact the law to improve freedom of expression in Palestine, as well as the importance of cooperating at the governmental and non-governmental levels to draft laws related to the media. General Adnan Aldomerey, official spokesman of the Security Forces, and Fadel Suleiman from AMAN also took the floor. The workshop was attended by participants from the civil society organisations as well as Academy students. All agreed on the necessity to enact the draft law as soon as possible.
- MADA held an open meeting in the Gaza Strip on self-censorship
The meeting, supported by the Open Society Foundations (OSF), focused on the reality of journalists’ self-censorship in Palestine. MADA’s Coordinator in Gaza, Dr. Ahmad Hammad, introduced a study recently published by MADA (entitled “Official media and freedom of expression in Palestine”) which in a section dedicated to censorship and self-censorship revealed that 80% of surveyed journalists practice self-censorship in their work, while only 19% do not.
The journalists attending the event talked about their personal experiences of self-censorship, the reasons of such a phenomenon as well as its negative impact on the quality of journalistic material. They emphasized the need to address the problem by enhancing their professionalism and investigative capabilities. They also stressed on the necessity of reforming the legal environment so that journalists are protected from prosecution on the background of their professional work, in addition to including the subject of (self)-censorship in Journalism Studies at university, and finding strategies that will help improving the status of the Palestinian media in general.
- MADA held a two-day training workshop for journalists in Tulkarem on the subject of freedom of expression and media legislations
This course was organized in the framework of the project “Defending freedom of expression through a healthy legal environment” funded by the European Union. MADA thanked the office of the Information Ministry and the Journalists' Syndicate branch in Tulkarem for their cooperation in the success of the training. At the end, certificates were handed to all participants, This course is part of a series of similar trainings and workshops MADA has been conducting in different cities of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
