Badio, Somalia -Somali Women Journalists Organisation (SWJO) has concluded a two-day round-table discussion today, in partnership with IMS-Fojo, on New Media Law: review validation. More than 20 participants attended the meeting; minister of information, State MPs, media directors, senior journalists, and government officials.
This is the third of a cycle of roundtable discussions across the regional states aimed at bolstering future amendments and validating the New Media Law, which was signed into a law by former President Mohamed Abdullahi Farmaajo.
These discussions of validation is a creation of a series of trainings on the gender perspective of the law in which SWJO has held in all federal member states and Benadir region in 2020 and 2021, where media workers have raised a concern of number of articles and paragraphs in the law, where it is not highlighting the women’s rights and violating the work of journalists and the freedom of expression at large.
On their opening remarks, the ministry of information of South-west state, Mr. Ilyas Ali Nor and Chairperson of Somali South-West Journalist Association (SOWEJA), Mr. Muhidin Hassan Mohamed, both expressed the importance to read this law and authenticate it, and underlined that this law needs amendments in terms of gender, freedom of expression, power of the government and among others in which they both encouraged these kind of discussions.
Participants had two days discussions and mostly reiterated the recommendations from roundtable discussion held in Mogadishu and Garowe, which has been previously recorded. Attendees debated at length articles concerning censorship, culture and religion, the role of the ministry of information at different states, the status of national media council and licensing journalistic work and among others.
The inadequacy of gender and women’s rights in the law were also pointed out so that, legislators can consider ways that working conditions and rights of female journalist can be better improved. Participants recommended some of these key issues that should be mentioned in the law: In accordance of the professional constitution and labour law, women can hold top positions and can perform as their counterpart male journalists do and more importantly no one can be discriminated according to their gender. Therefore, attendees emphasized the need of including articles that protect and assure gender equality in media.
SWJO’s Leyla Osman, Thanked the participants on her closing remarks and emphasized the need to encourage and influence law makers so that, we can finally have a law, where gender and women’s rights are respected, and freedom of speech and the work of the journalists in general are not violated.
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