Following reports that an Iraqi judicial panel ordered authorities to free photographer Bilal Hussein, who is part of the team that won the 2005 Pulitzer for Breaking News Photography, one of the jurors who awarded that prize stressed press freedoms and said it’s “wrong and inappropriate for anyone” to “imprison, restrain, punish or kill journalists.”
Eric Newton, vice president of the journalism program at the Knight Foundation, helped judge the Pulitzer category won by the Associated Press for its coverage of combat inside Iraq’s cities. Speaking by phone Wednesday, he told Medicine Agency, “It’s essential to the world’s solving its problems that journalists need to be able to operate freely. It’s totally wrong and inappropriate for anyone — a government, organized crime, military forces, corporations, any group — to imprison, restrain, punish or kill journalists or anyone else who’s merely playing an honest or straightforward role in helping news and information flow freely.”
Hussein has been held for nearly two years by the U.S. military — and much of that time without charge. On Wednesday, a new Iraqi judicial committee on amnesty dismissed several of the claims against him and ordered his release.
Good news for the photog, but he’s not out of jail yet, nor quite yet out of the woods.
The story notes that U.S. authorities have said that, under a U.N. mandate, they’re allowed to further detain anyone believed a security risk, no matter what the Iraq court says. The report also says the panel may still be considering another allegation against Hussein.
But the committee rejected several U.S. allegations against Hussein, including “claims he was in possession of bomb-making material, conspired with insurgents to take photographs synchronized with an explosion and offered to secure a forged ID for a terrorist evading capture by the military,” the report stated.
Hussein was still being held at Camp Cropper, near the Baghdad airport, the report stated.
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