Lugar said the government should thoroughly investigate and prosecute attacks on journalists. “Democracy depends on the free flow of information to the public, which depends on a press free to do its work without government intimidation.”

Philippine Ambassador Albert del Rosario told the Senate committee that of the 33 cases that came to the panel’s attention, Manila was able to account, at least initially, for 31 cases recorded in the 2000-2005 period. Of those 31, he said, 15 killings had been investigated, resulting in the filing of cases which are currently undergoing trial.

Lugar requested a written update on the status of the unresolved cases in August and urged the envoy to advise the Senate committee as soon as any convictions were recorded in the trials currently underway.

In Msnils, Press Secretary Ignacio R. Bunye said, “Our law enforcement authorities are doing their fair share in resolving the cases of slain journalists and bringing the perpetrators to the bar of justice. It is a gross exaggeration to compare the state of the press in the Philippines to that of Iraq which is a virtual war zone.”

In a “major study” released April 27, Freedom House said press freedom suffered setbacks in a number of important countries in Asia (including the Philippines) and Africa last year. “The most significant declines occurred in Asia (East Timor, Nepal, the Philippines and Thailand), Africa (Uganda, Botswana, and Ethipia), and the former Soviet Union (Russia and Uzbekistan,),” it said.

The report does not include the emergency rule imposed by President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo in February this year which resulted in government crackdowns against the media, the raids on newspaper offices and police threats against the print and broadcast media.

The Freedom House study, called “Freedom of the Press 2006: A Global Survey of Media Independence,” said “Press freedom declined in the Philippines because of a continued high level of physical violence directed against reporters coupled with increasing official intolerance towards investigative journalists.”

Freedom House said “The Arroyo administration has generally shown considerable intolerance toward the media, especially foreign, for exposing corruption. Controversy surrounded the president’s June 27 ‘I’m sorry’ press conference, where only ten ‘pre-selected’ reporters were allowed to ask questions and representatives of international news organizations were barred from the event.”

Accompanying the release of the report was a global map categorizing countries as Free, Partly-Free and Not Free. Early this year, Freedom House also rated Philippine democracy from Free to Partly Free.

In its 2005 World Press Freedom Review, the IPI said the Philippines is becoming the “most dangerous country” with nine journalists murdered in 2005 as “its government appears to be encouraging the violence by failing to properly investigate the murders.” “Nine journalists were killed in 2005 in the Philippines, according to IPI statistics, and by the end of January 2006, when this report was written, the first two murders of 2006 had already taken place,” said the report.

The IPI report said the government’s non-intervention in these cases simply encourages attacks against journalists.

Supporters of President Arroyo denounced all these reports saying Filipino media are still free to cover the news. At the same time, a journalist from Surigao was gunned down in broad daylight in metro Manila May 2.

The Freedom Forum report said that while the constitution guarantees freedom of the press, “journalist-targeted violence remains the greatest threat to press freedom in the country. Despite the Arroyo administration’s launch of a $92,000 Press Freedom Fund to curb violence against the media, a general culture of impunity continues to predominate, and critics claim that journalists’ killers are not brought to trial intentionally. In cases where suspects have been identified and arrested, the person or persons who ordered the killing generally have not. Claiming that more journalists have been killed since 2001 under the Arroyo administration than during Marcos’s martial law regime, the NUJP has criticized the government for not doing more to prevent the murders, and the International Press Institute has identified government non-intervention as a critical part of the problem,” Freedom House said.

The report cited the Hello Garci tapes, the impeachment trial, the controversial executive order banning government officials from testifying in Congressional hearings and the campaign for charter change.

It continued:

“Journalist-targeted violence remains the greatest threat to press freedom in the country. According to the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP), ten journalists were killed in 2005, in addition to numerous assassination attempts and death threats.

The general escalation in journalist-targeted violence over the last several years earned the Philippines a ranking second only to Iraq as the ”most dangerous place for journalists to operate" by the International Federation of Journalists in January and as the single “most dangerous country for journalists” by the Committee to Protect Journalists in May.

By Alberto Alfaro