The Association of Editors in Chief wants the Amsterdam court to reconsider its decision to ban reporters from the AD to be banned from the Marengo trial around drug criminal Ridouan Taghi. This is what the board chairman of the Society, NOS editor-in-chief Marcel Gelauff, writes in a letter on Saturday NRC letter to the court. “We can only see this as an unacceptable attack on journalism, whereby further consequences for journalism cannot be ruled out,” said Gelauff.
Friday evening made it AD familiar that his reporters are no longer welcome at Marengo sessions for the rest of the year. AD.nl had accidentally broadcast several minutes of live footage of the long-running lawsuit at the end of June, in which the names of all suspects passed uncensored, according to ANP news agency. That the Amsterdam court subsequently decided to exclude the news medium from the Taghi trial for the last six months of 2022, the Society of Chief Editors calls “inappropriate” on Saturday.
The Society says that excluding ADjournalists has led to “shocked reactions” from fellow reporters and editors-in-chief. There is “much concern about potential precedents,” write Gelauff. “Journalists face intimidation and attempts to make their jobs more difficult and restrictive almost every day.” That the court AD “and the freedom of the press” is now “substantially” curtailed, can contribute to this development, according to the NOS editor-in-chief.
Also read: Communicating with the outside world from a heavily guarded cell, Taghi succeeded
‘Individual error’
According to the Society, the mistake of the AD ‘serious’ and the sense of responsibility necessary for such a sensitive process was ‘insufficient’. But, writes Gelauff, the editors-in-chief have “no understanding for the gravity of the measure taken”. According to the NOS boss, the court harms the freedom of the press by making the work “of a total journalistic organization” impossible for “a very important and very relevant news topic that affects multiple facets of our rule of law and democracy”. The court punished “a large journalistic organization – including all its readers” for an individual error, according to Gelauff.
AD– editor-in-chief Rennie Rijpma said Friday find the punishment “severe” but accept it. Despite the lack of access, the newspaper announced that it would continue to write about the Marengo process. That case revolves around six liquidations and nine attempts to do so. In addition to the main suspect Ridouan Taghi, sixteen of his accomplices are also on trial.