Freedom Forum's attention has been drawn towards an incident of press freedom violation occurred in Morang, a district in the eastern part of Nepal, on December 22, 2011.
A person Subash Rai of the district beat up journalist Heman Yatri under the direction of a teacher Raj Kumar Rai over the news journalist Yatri wrote about a case of domestic violence against woman.
In a telephone conversation with the Media Monitoring Desk of the Freedom Forum, journalist Yatri affiliated to Naya Sansar weekly published from Sunsari district, said, "Subash Rai beat me under the direction of teacher Rajkumar Rai, accusing me of assassinating his (Rajkumar) character over the news reporting I made five months back on domestic violence against women."
The news was about the plight of a woman victimized with domestic violence, he said, adding that his friends saved him in the incident. He got slight injury in his eye.
In this way, even the teachers who are educated and source of knowledge, are involved in the violation of the media freedom. Similar incident was occurred a month ago in Sunsari. Such incidents are responsible for growing self-censorship among journalists which is fatal to the free and fair journalism.
Freedom Forum, therefore, urges the concerned authorities to bring to book the attacker in order to help minimize the impunity thereby protecting right to information.
For more information,
Freedom Forum
monitoring@freedomforum.org.np
01-4102030/ 4102022