Harold Hoyte, President, Nation Publishing and the Bajan press took an important and crucial first step toward press self-regulation by forming a Caribbean-wide steering committee made up of editors and publishers from the region who are interested in forming a press council and press complaints commission.



Over fifteen regional Caribbean editors came together for the two-day seminar held in Hastings, Barbados, on 24 and 25 June. The delegates reached a unanimous consensus in favour of pursuing self-regulation. Half of the delegation volunteered to sit on a high-profile steering committee to work toward establishing support by approaching other influential editors and publishers in the region to explain the value of self-regulation of the press.

The CPU facilitated a three-member team to travel to Barbados to introduce various options for self-regulation of the press. The UK delegation comprised Professor Robert Pinker, Acting Chairman of the UK Press Complaints Commission, Ian Beales, a long-standing member of the UK Code Committee and former regional editor and Kim Latimer, a former Canadian Broadcast journalist and now CPU researcher, who acted as rapporteur.

Delegates came to the table with a solid agenda and they were armed with questions drawn from their experience of the former - and now defunct - Caribbean Press Council. As a result, the debate was lively, challenging and the delegates took the opportunity to form its very first steering committee. On the last day of the seminar, the steering committee was engaged in its first private meeting in an effort to garner support for a Caribbean-wide press self-regulation body.

The Caribbean seminar was deemed a successful ending to the series of pan-Commonwealth regional seminars on self-regulatory systems in the Commonwealth press conducted over the past year by the CPU and organised by Lindsay Ross, CPU Acting Executive Director.

The CPU is heartened with the outcome of the series. We are pleased to announce that in West Africa, Nigeria has completed half of its fundraising and has already received unanimous support for self-regulation among members of the industry.

Also, Kenya launched its press council one week after the seminar was held in Nairobi and are encouraging other East African countries to follow suit. Sri Lanka recently abolished a centuries old criminal defamation law that has been contested by members of the independent press for nearly a decade; it was flagged during the CPU self-regulation seminar held there in February. And our recent experience with the Caribbean delegation, which is presently working to gain support from prominent regional editors and publishers in the region, has illustrated a very encouraging outcome in the pursuit of press freedom and public awareness.

The project will be concluded in the UK in late autumn with a one-day seminar in London to review the project and discuss the follow-up work needed. This event will also mark the publication of a major CPU report fully detailing the content and outcomes of the seminar series.

Lindsay Ross | lindsay@cpu.org.uk
Executive Director,
Commonwealth Press Union,
3rd Floor, 292 Vauxhall Bridge Road
London SW1V 1AE
Tel: +44 20 7233 7822
Fax: + 44 20 7828 0660