The US journalists' group the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) on Friday protested the UN Geneva Office's recent decision to deny Taiwanese reporters access to cover the annual meeting of the World Health Assembly (WHA) being held in Geneva this week.
In a letter to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the group's president, Irwin Gratz, said the UN's new requirement that reporters must be passport holders of UN member states in order to be issued passes to cover UN activities violates Article 19 of the 1948 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights which guarantees the right of everyone to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media regardless of frontiers.
The SPJ urged the UN to restore its original policy of issuing press passes to any organization or reporter regardless of their country of origin.
The SPJ, founded in 1909 in Indianapolis, Indiana, is the US' most broad-based organization of journalists and is dedicated to promoting freedom of the press.
The letter was the latest protests by an international press group in support of Taiwanese journalists' right to cover the WHA meeting. The International Federation of Journalists, Reporters Without Borders and the International Society for Human Rights have voiced similar protests.
Taiwanese reporters flocked to Geneva to cover the country's bid to join the WHA as an observer but were turned away by the UN Geneva Office on the grounds that Taiwan is not a UN member.
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