Bhubaneswar: “Nowadays, every citizen is a journalist with smartphones, social platforms and blogs which expands the area of journalism and promotes freedom of speech. Hence, legal aid is quite essential for mediapersons,” opined Justice AS Naidu, while addressing a gathering of mediapersons at Conference on Media Legal Defence organised by CLAP Legal Services Institute here on Thursday.
Naidu appealed to the mediapersons to be fearless in expressing their views, focussing on the problems of people which may invite ire of the wrong elements from within the system “There would be no problem for journalists if they are writing for a right cause,” he said.
He also assured the gathering and expressed hope that the said institute would provide legal aid to the needy mediapersons.
Bikash Das of CLAP briefed the gathering about the legal aid services and presented some cases in which mediapersons had been aided legally and took the cases up with the Supreme Court to protect the journalists and for freedom of speech.
Sopphie Pollack and Patrick Regan of Media Legal Defence Initiative (UK), Prof PK Sarkar, former CBI Judge HB Das along with Snigdha Panigrahi and Sangita Majhi spoke at the inaugural session of the conference.
Later, senior mediapersons including Arun Panda, Sandeep Sahu, Debendra Prusty, Dikshya Tiwari and others expressed their concerns over rising defamation cases and other type of tactics against mediapersons to suppress their right to freedom of expression and felt the need for such legal defence.
