Intl. conference to mark PCCSL 10th anniversary kicks off today

Monday, 13 January 2014 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

The tenth anniversary celebrations of the Press Complaints Commission of Sri Lanka (PCCSL) will be marked with an International Conference on ‘Ethical Reporting and Self-Regulation’ beginning on Monday, 13 January with the participation of delegates from the South and South East Asian region and elsewhere. The conference is being held in partnership with UNESCO.

Representatives from statutory Press Councils of India and Pakistan and regulatory bodies from Bangladesh, Nepal, Maldives, Myanmar, Hong Kong, and Malaysia will also make presentations at the conference which will be opened at the Lakshman Kadirgamar Institute of Foreign Relations and Strategic Studies with keynote speeches by Prof. Savitri Goonesekere (Emeritus Professor of Law of the University of Colombo and has served fellowships in several universities in the US and UK. She was a member of the UN Convention on the elimination of all discrimination against women. Professor Goonesekere was a member of the Editorial Advisory Committee, UN Secretary General’s study on Violence against Children) and Ian Beales, Secretary of the Editors Code of the United Kingdom. There will be a recorded video presentation by Judge C.G. Weeramantry, retired judge of the International Court of Justice in The Hague and a prolific writer on media freedom and media responsibilities, who is currently in Australia. Other eminent speakers include Toby Mendel, Executive Director of the Centre for Law and Democracy, Canada, Prof. Shakuntala Rao, Chairperson, Communication Studies of Plattsburgh University, New York, Nandini Sahai, Director, International Centre, Goa and Iskra Panevska, Communications Head for UNESCO, New Delhi. The working sessions will include discussions on Codes of Ethics, Cyber News, the Right to Information Law, and regulatory frameworks in several countries. Sri Lanka has the only self-regulatory mechanism for the newspaper industry in South Asia. These sessions will be held at the auditorium of the Sri Lanka Press Institute and will be streamed live to viewers around the world: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/pccsl---10-years. There will be simultaneous translations into Sinhala and Tamil The PCCSL, the newspaper industry’s self-regulatory ‘policeman’ was established in October 2003 with a Board of Directors comprising representatives of the Newspaper Society of Sri Lanka, The Editors’ Guild of Sri Lanka, Free Media Movement and the Sri Lanka Working Journalists Association with the support of several other media associations. An autonomous Dispute Resolution Council headed by former Secretary General of Parliament and one-time Ombudsman Sam Wijesinha works on the basis of conciliation, mediation and arbitration under the Arbitration Act No. 11 of 1995 and has settled more than a thousand reader complaints over the years.