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OSCE Urges Ukraine to Protect Media Freedoms

14 October 2010 04:03 (UTC +04:00)

Baku â€“ APA. Europeâ€™s largest security organization is pressing Ukraineâ€™s political leadership to take â€œurgent stepsâ€ to safeguard media freedoms eroding under the presidency of Viktor Yanukovych, APA reports quoting â€œThe Voice of Americaâ€.
Dunja Mijatovic, media freedom chief for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, spoke Wednesday in Kyiv after meetings with Foreign Minister Kostyantyn Hryshchenko and other officials.
She said that the case of missing editor Vasyl Klymentyev and the growing number of physical attacks against journalists are having a chilling effect on the media, and called for â€œconcrete actionâ€ to stop the negative developments.
Mijatovic was in the Ukraine at the invitation of Mr. Yanukovych. She said she welcomed the Ukrainian authoritiesâ€™ openness, but urged the government to refrain from â€œany attempt to influence or censor media.â€
Mijatovic said she welcomed the reopening of an investigation into the 2000 death of opposition journalist Georgiy Gongadze, whose decapitated remains were found two months after his disappearance. Prosecutors in September said the late Interior Minister Yuri Kravchenko had ordered the murder.
Klymentyev was editor-in-chief of the Novuy Stil newspaper when he disappeared August 11. The publication focuses on corruption issues in eastern Ukraine.
The Ukrainian media complained regularly of intimidation under the long post-Soviet presidency of Leonid Kuchma. But tensions eased after the 2004 pro-Western Orange Revolution that brought the liberal Viktor Yushchenko to the presidency.
Complaints have recently resurfaced. In early September, a Kyiv judge stripped two independent opposition television stations of their licenses. Analysts say the shutdowns benefitted Valeriy Khoroshkovsky, owner of a pro-Yanukovych media empire and head of Ukraineâ€™s SBU government security service.