Kurdish Media Accreditation for EU Summit

International Federation of Journalists protests refusal for accreditation of Kurdish media to the EU Seville summit.

Brussels

Aidan White, General Secretary of International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) sent a letter to Portavoz del Gobierno and Maria Jose Valdeperez.

The letter is about the refusal for accreditation of Kurdish media to the European Union (EU) Seville summit.

Here is the letter:

"The International Federation of Journalists, the world's largest journalists' organization representing over 500,000 journalists worldwide, is deeply concerned about the failure to grant accreditation to the European Union (EU) Summit in Seville 21-22 June to the following journalists: Chris den Hond, MedyaTV; Cemal Ucar, Mesopotamia Agency and Kurdish newspaper Europe Ozgur Politika.

According to our information, both journalists applied in a normal and professional way and both received exactly the same reply by you in which no justification was given.

We kindly request you to give an adequate explanation or otherwise grant them the facilities and provisions to perform their work as journalists.

Both journalists work for Turkish-Kurdish media and are worried that the refusal for accreditation is directly linked to the EU decision to add the PKK on their list of terrorist organizations.

Both journalists have reported on EU summits in the past and we need to know why policy changed." (NM)