16/12/2020
The Kurdistan Regional Ministry of Culture has issued a decree extending the closure of NRT channel in the region for another week.
The Press Freedom Advocacy Association in Iraq learned from the director of the channel’s Baghdad office, Omed Mohammed, that the decision of the Ministry of Culture to continue to close the channel in the province and prevent it from carrying out its journalistic work for another week coincided with the protests that began in the city of Sulaimaniyah and its districts and outskirts, accompanied by the arrest of dozens of protesters and journalists, pointing out that the channel received a copy of the ministry’s decision before the end of the period of closing the doors of the channel and confiscating its equipment.
The Press Freedom Advocacy Association in Iraq considers the decision to be an insistence on the constitutional violation committed by the regionalGovernment, based on an invalid law that is totally contrary to the Federal Constitution and is an infringement of the principles of the Constitution, which allowed for the freedom of journalistic and media work.
The association is also concerned that the region’s governing authority continues to take repressive measures in dealing with media and journalists in Kurdistan, amid regrettable regional and international silence.
The Association calls on the federal government to take a firm stand against the actions of the regionalGovernment against the work of the media and to speed up the protection of the remaining space for the freedom of journalistic work.
