NRT Arabic banned from entering parliament building

2019/6/25

The House of Representatives decided on Tuesday to ban the Arabic channel of NRT from entering its building preceded by attacks by deputies from the coalition of Al-nasser against the correspondent of the Channel.

Channel correspondent Anmar Ghazi told Press Freedom Advocacy Association in Iraq, “he was on coverage on Monday, with live broadcast on the channel’s Facebook page to cover a press conference of the Al-nasser Alliance MP Falah al-Khafaji, and during the conference the Deputy received a telephone call and neglected the conference. the Channel broadcasting was accidentally recorded while the MP was busy calling especially that there was no prior hint of such an action, “adding that when I was in the media department today, MP Yousef Al-Killabi and accused the channel of being an outsider agent and asked me to leave the media department, followed by the decision of the Speaker of the House of Representatives To prevent the channel from entering the building and cancelling its accreditation with the media department. “

The Association condemns the attitude towards Anmar Ghazi, and requests the speaker of Parliament Mohammed al-Halbousi to review the incident and reconsider his decision since it is a violation of the freedom of journalistic work that was constitutionally guaranteed, especially since the correspondent did not mean to shoot and broadcast the call but it was a continuing broadcast, and there is no room for political pressure to make a decision against professional standards.

The association expresses its astonishment at the power of the MPs upon the media department in the Parliament, and their right to punish a media body with all its cadres about a mistake made by an MP and not the journalist.