(MENAFN - The Peninsula) AMMAN - Government Spokesperson Nasser Judeh on Monday reiterated Jordan's "strong commitment" to increasing the level of press freedoms in the country in reference to an index on the state of press freedom around the world released last week by an international press watchdog.
According to the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders (RWB) Worldwide Press Freedom Index 2007, the Kingdom's position fell from 109 out of 186 countries in 2006, to 122 in out of 169 nations in 2007.
Judeh said the government "will thoroughly study the index in order to give a serious and responsible response to Reporters Without Borders".
"We take this report very seriously, but we have to study the different aspects that were taken into consideration and this is something which is going to take us some time," Judeh told reporters at the weekly press briefing yesterday.
He also said that over the past years, Jordan has done a lot in terms of press freedoms, "but, of course, there is more to be achieved gradually".
Jordan's setback dashed hopes among RWB members of having the Kingdom, as well as other Arab countries such as Egypt and Morocco, as good examples on how to improve press freedoms in the region.
"We are surprised by Jordan's step back� All the signs we saw over the past year with regard to press freedoms made Jordan lose ground for the third consecutive year in our ranking", Hajar Smouni, from RWB's Middle East and Northern Africa desk, said.
RWB's index is the outcome of a questionnaire sent to its 15 partner organisations worldwide and its network of 130 correspondents, as well as journalists, researchers, jurists and human rights activists.
The rankings reflect press freedom violations that took place between September 1, 2006 and September 1, 2007 in both conventional and electronic media.
Meanwhile, Nidal Mansour, director of the Centre for Defending the Freedom of Journalists (CDFJ), said the results of RWB's latest world index came as no "surprise", adding that it confirms the findings of a CDFJ report, issued on May 3 to mark World Press Freedom Day, which states that prior-censorship is still a common method to curb freedoms and "remains like a phantom that haunts the media scene, especially the weekly press".
"We are still waiting for the government to honour its pledges in the area of press freedoms and urge it to respond to King Abdullah's aspirations of having a level of freedom of the press as high as the sky," Mansour told The Jordan Times.
The media activist added that the new Press and Publications Law (PPL), endorsed by Parliament in May, does not ensure greater freedoms despite the fact that articles sanctioning the arrest of journalists were scrapped. Instead, he said, the new regulation maintained a clause allowing for journalists to be detained and tried under 20 other laws including the Penal Code.
But Jordan Press Association President Tareq Momani disagreed with the results of RWB's index. He said Jordan stands at a position of "relative freedom of press", explaining that on a scale of one to one hundred, the Kingdom would be around the 50s.
This calculation, Momani added, will be backed up by a soon-to-be released Higher Media Council survey. The report, covering some 500 journalists and media staff working in Jordan, shows that the Kingdom enjoys "relative" freedom of the press for the third consecutive year.
"Also, the new PPL is yielding positive results. Since its endorsement, no journalist in Jordan has been detained on opinion cases," Momani pointed out.
With regards to criticism by local press freedom activists, Momani said sometimes representatives of such organisations in the country do not give the full picture of the situation and "distort the reality by seeking their own goals".
RWB published its first annual ranking of press freedoms in 2002. Since that year, Jordan has consecutively ranked 99, 122, 121, 96, 109 and 122 on the list.
"We hope that next year Jordan will be back in the upper part of the ranking", Smouni said.
