June 05, 2007

The Venezuelan TV station’s closure is an infringement on your human rights too

Sir, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in its Article 19 states that “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to . . . seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers. This makes it clear that the arbitrary closure of a TV station in Venezuela although it affects directly the Venezuelan peoples right to expression, it also impairs any other citizen of the world’s equal human right to access information. This is made especially clear by the fact that the most reasonable proxy for true information that the world knows, is the free and diversified creation of opinions.

In this respect I need to ask whether you could ever be satisfied with a rainforest with only eucalyptuses and red parrots. Of course not! Therefore we need your help to conserve the info-diversity in Venezuela. As the indigenous to this small planet earth that you all are, this is your problem too. You do not need Venezuela to join the list of countries with absence of information, such as North Korea.