Darfur Consortium Events

Social Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP), Nigeria

The organization's main event, a Media Forum, was held on September 15.

The Forum was attended by eight journalists from a number of media establishments including Radio Lagos, Rhythm FM, Governance Today and The Nation. Human rights and governance activists from SERAP, IAP, Campaign for Accountable Governance through Elections (CAGE) and Centre for Public Integrity, also attended, in addition to some human rights lawyers. The Forum provided an opportunity to exchange ideas on the Darfur crisis and discussions centered on how to generate media coverage for the Darfur crisis, especially as many of the main stream media establishments are reducing the news space for foreign news.

The journalists were gently reminded of their social responsibility role in public affairs reporting and urged the need to balance news reports on political issues (which takes the most news space since the elections last April) and the need to push the Darfur issue to the fore-front of news reporting, if not the front pages, but to lead on the foreign pages and foreign broadcasts in the electronic media.

There was a broad agreement that the new regime in Abuja needs to be pushed to adopt a proactive approach to the Darfur crisis and the need to use the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and African Union (AU) advocacy opportunities to further push this. There was also a commitment by the journalists to set up an informal Journalists Against Violence in Darfur (JAVD) group that will meet electronically every month. SERAP and IAP made a commitment to involve other journalists, especially foreign reporters and reporters reporting the presidency in this coalition. The two groups will lead in facilitating the setting of JAVD.

The journalists, however, advised that because of items competing for news space, press statements and media advisory on Darfur should be sent to the newsrooms at least three days before publication where possible.