No room for questions at press conference on presidential elections

  12 April 2018    Read: 1483
No room for questions at press conference on presidential elections

The OSCE PA, OSCE ODIHR and the PA of the Council of Europe gave a joint press conference on the preliminary report after the presidential elections in Azerbaijan on 11 April.

The statement made by Nilza de Sena, Special Co-ordinator and Leader of the short-team OSCE observation mission, Viorel Riceard Badea, Head of the delegation from the PACE, and Corien Jonker, Head of the Election Observation Mission from the OSCE/ODIHR, included several negative comments and recommendations, whereas the final report will be delivered in two months.

However, it could hardly be called a press conference. While the heads of observers spoke of limited environment and legal framework for the media to cover the election process transparently, today’s press conference was nothing, but limitation of journalists’ rights. Gathered in a stuffy room for over 2 hours, what we heard was a number of statements as a response to journalists, who tried to disrupt the conference. The statements delivered were what we could have easily read online or from the press release they produced afterwards. We, media representatives, were not given an opportunity to pose our questions and receive a direct answer to them. A member of AzVision English also expressed her comments directly to the observation team.

Sorry, but press conferences should not be a platform for long explanations, but should grant equal opportunities to every journalist, who has a question. Isn’t that a limitation of a journalists’ right to produce a transparent report and violation of freedom of speech?

 

AzVision


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