The Alliance has strongly urged the Australian Society of Travel Writers not to accept a bid for its annual general meeting to be hosted in Fiji next year, in view of the Fiji military regime’s strict censorship and hardline in controlling news reporting.Click read more for further information.

The Alliance believes that ASTW members would be compromising their integrity to accept the hospitality of the regime in the current circumstances.

Alliance federal secretary, Christopher Warren, said that while ASTW “members may be encouraged by Fiji’s regime to visit and report favourably on Fiji, other foreign journalists risk being banned from entry while local journalists must daily bow to the demands of the newsroom censors”.

Warren has written to the ASTW in his capacity as a member of the Asia-Pacific Steering Committee of the International Federation of Journalists to remind members of the organisation’s Code of Ethics, which states that members will “encourage responsible professional standards of reporting” and “safeguard the professional independence of travel writers”. The society’s stated mandate is to promote “unbiased reporting of information on travel topics”.

“The staging of the AGM in Fiji would risk compromising the ASTW,” Warren said in the letter. “While ASTW members may seek to present a realistic picture of Fiji’s current circumstances in their professional work as travel writers, they would be denied this right within Fiji, and any critical commentary in their journalistic or other work would be blocked from circulation within Fiji.

“Fiji is therefore not a suitable venue in which the ASTW can reasonably promote professional travel writing in keeping with the ASTW’s code of ethics and international journalistic standards that support freedom of the media, expression and association.”

The Alliance’s concerns follow a considerable worsening of the media situation in Fiji over the past 18 months, with police raids on media offices, deportations of publishers and editors, calls by military officers for media houses to be shut down, a “watch list” and bans on foreign journalists, and contempt of court rulings carrying hefty punishments.

In April 2009, the regime imposed emergency regulations with orders that journalists and media outlets submit “sensitive” news reports to officials. Full-time censors have been placed in newsrooms.

A copy of the IFJ’s letter to the ASTW is available here.