Gulf Times – Qatar’s top-selling English daily newspaper - First Page

By Bonnie James Deputy News Editor

Qatar urgently needs a legal framework for the media, replacing the Press and Publication Law issued three decades ago, urged Jan Keulen, the new director of Doha Centre for Media Freedom (DCMF). “It should be clear what the media can and cannot do, and I hope with all my heart that this legislation will give guarantees to the media to operate according to international standards,” he told Gulf Times. The veteran Dutch journalist, media educationist and press freedom advocate, who joined DCMF on April 1, is “very much convinced that Qatar’s leadership has the political will” in this regard. The new media law should be issued after an inclusive process to ensure that the stakeholders – the media community in the country - are heard, he suggested. Based in Beirut, Cairo, Mexico City and Amman during the 1980s and 90s as a correspondent of the leading Dutch daily de Volkskrant, Keulen said that he had been guaranteed a free hand to build the DCMF . Keulen, who came from a Dutch NGO, Free Voice, also working in the field of press freedom advocacy and capacity building, has succeeded DCMF’s founding director Robert Menard who left in 2009 following differences of opinion with the Qatari authorities. “We are not going to be a centre dealing only with cases in Iceland and Argentina, but also we are focusing on Qatar. And this has to do with many issues, but one very important issue is credibility. We want to be a credible and reliable organisation,” Keulen declared. He would like to see more freedom for the media in Qatar. He believes press freedom is never done: it is a terrain which has to be conquered professionally day after day. “There are some countries which are very free, maybe like the northern European countries, but as a matter of fact the struggle for freedom continues also there, it is never a job done.” Asked about the challenges in the quest for media freedom, the 61-year-old Keulen, who started out in journalism at the age of 26 in 1976, replied there were always lots of people who did not like the truth. “That is the reason so many journalists are going through difficulties in their job; some of them even get killed in some extreme situations. “At another level, sometimes companies or governmental agencies or other institutions are not interested that others are in the know.” The recipient of the highest Dutch journalism award for his reporting of the Lebanese war, Keulen thinks it is very important to create awareness at the level of the journalists, general public, and in some cases, also at the level of the authorities. “Media freedom  includes freedom to have access to information, if you have a country where the press is completely free to write whatever they want but when they knock on the door of a ministry if there is no reply, what is it good for?”, he asked while explaining all these things were interrelated.

Source: http://www.gulf-times.com