World Information Tuesday

China stifling media despite
Olympics pledge: group
Agence France-Presse . Hong Kong

Foreign journalists still face intimidation and limited access to parts of China despite promises that media restrictions would be loosened ahead of the Olympics, a rights group said Monday.
‘The gap between government rhetoric and the reality for foreign journalists remains considerable,’ US-based Human Rights Watch said in a report released Monday in Hong Kong.
‘Their working conditions today, while improved in some respects, have deteriorated in other areas, dramatically in the case of Tibet.
‘The result is that during a period when reporting freedoms for foreign journalists in China should be at an all-time high, correspondents face severe difficulties in accessing ‘forbidden zones’.’
Those zones include both areas and subjects which the Chinese government considers ‘sensitive’ such as Tibet, which was the site of deadly rioting in March and made off-limits to foreign reporters. In June, China said foreign reporters could return, but put in place an ‘onerous’ application process that meant any permission was unlikely to be granted, the report said.
AFP has made an application under the process, and has not been granted permission a week after it was submitted.
Sophie Richardson, Asia advocacy director of Human Rights Watch, criticised the International Olympic Committee for failing to put pressure on China to improve its human rights record.
‘Proponents and critics of the Beijing Games agreed on one thing, that fewer restrictions for international media and scrutiny of China at this time would constitute progress,’ she said. ‘We hit rock bottom when the president of the IOC praised the Chinese government for its improvement in human rights a few months ago, which is just plainly incompatible with the facts on the ground,’ she said.

One in four separated S Koreans
dies before reunion
Agence France-Presse . Seoul

More than one in four of the South Koreans who sought reunions with long-lost relatives in North Korea died while awaiting an opportunity, official data showed Monday.
Seoul’s unification ministry said 35,477 of the 127,251 people who had requested reunions had since died – mainly of old age.
More than 96 per cent of those who died were in their 70s or older.
‘Family reunions are a pressing issue given the advanced age of many separated relatives,’ an official at South Korea’s Red Cross said.
‘They are dying in tears even at this moment.’
The reunion programme began in earnest after the first inter-Korean summit in 2000 eased tensions between the historical enemies.
But it has been put on hold during a worsening of relations between Pyongyang and the new conservative government in Seoul.
Since 2000, 16,212 Koreans from both sides of the heavily fortified border have been allowed face-to-face meetings.
Some 3,245 others – mostly those too infirm to travel to special meeting centres – have been reunited via live video link.
Seoul’s Red Cross said a 2005 census showed 710,000 South Koreans have relatives in North Korea. It said this may be an underestimate since some Southerners do not disclose the links.


Former South Korea leader faces
info leak probe
Agence France-Presse . Seoul

South Korea’s presidential office accused ex-president Roh Moo-Hyun Monday of keeping classified documents illegally at his private retirement home.
Roh violated the law by possessing classified records from his five-year tenure which ended in February, said presidential spokesman Lee Dong-Kwan.
‘This is a clear illegal activity,’ he told reporters, accusing Roh and aides of rejecting a request to return the data.
Unauthorised leaks or possession of classified information can be punished by up to seven years in prison or fines of up to 20 million won (about 20,000 dollars).
‘We regard this case as very serious because original records are being kept’ at Roh’s private home near the southern city of Busan, the spokesman said.
The office of new president Lee Myung-Bak will launch a probe into Roh’s activities, while the state archives will take action to confiscate the data, the spokesman said.
Yonhap news agency, quoting officials, said Roh and his aides are accused of removing the original hard disk drives from the main servers in the presidential office.
In 2004 Roh’s aides established an intranet to electronically manage all documents from the office.