The Mauritanian Journalists’ Union called for revision of the law establishing the independent press support fund, saying it needed to be rescued from its “catastrophic situation”.
The Union’s statement said the fund’s course “has deviated significantly to a point where silence is no longer acceptable. Its management has descended into nihilism and negligence, causing its failure to achieve the intended results and turning it into a mere instrument for wasting and fragmenting public money in a suspicious manner”.
Text of the statement:
The Mauritanian Journalists’ Union was surprised by a press briefing issued by the public support fund’s management committee reporting that 111 newspapers, 255 websites and 28 press organisations had benefited. We then contacted the chair of the fund’s management committee
and asked him to publish the committee’s detailed minutes, along with lists and addresses of headquarters, authorisations to practise, names and management of newspapers, websites, television channels and radio stations, and lists of organisations, their members, licences and congress dates. This would allow us to verify the information’s accuracy, legal eligibility for public support and compliance with the scoring criteria used to distribute the fund. We also asked what had become of the allocations for journalists’ professional training provided for in the law establishing the fund. This request, like the others submitted nearly two weeks ago, received no response.
After nine years of distributing public press support—public money that must be safeguarded and allocated honestly and transparently to its designated purposes—its management has strayed so far that silence is no longer acceptable. It has descended into nihilism and negligence, causing its failure to deliver the expected results and turning it into a mere instrument for wasting and fragmenting public money in a suspicious manner.
We at the Mauritanian Journalists’ Union, which originally initiated the demand for a public fund first supporting print press and later electronic press, call on the government to urgently decide to revise the law establishing the fund to rescue it from its catastrophic situation.
We inform journalists, press organisations and the public that we reject what has happened to the fund’s resources. For greater transparency, we will request an investigation by the competent authorities into how the fund’s income for 2019 was managed, its conformity with the criteria and the beneficiaries’ eligibility in terms of licences and institutional requirements. We call on the High Authority for the Press and Audiovisual Media, as the fund’s supervising body, to take full responsibility and publish the committee’s minutes in every detail.
The Executive Bureau