French television journalist Hugo Clément speaking out about the arrest in Queensland on Monday. Video: Euronews

Pacific Media Watch Newsdesk

The Queensland Police Service (QPS) has dropped trespass charges against a prominent French journalist and his film crew who were arrested while filming anti-Adani protesters earlier this week, reports ABC News.

France 2 reporter Hugo Clément – a high-profile environmental and climate change journalist –  his crew and several protesters were arrested on the railway line at the entrance to Adani’s Abbot Point coal-loading facility on Monday.

In a statement, QPS said it had “reviewed the circumstances surrounding the arrests of five people at a port facility near Bowen on Monday”.

READ MORE: RSF demands Australian police drop charges against French TV crew

“The decision to withdraw charges follows careful consideration of the circumstances, including QPS policies and procedures,” the statement said.

“As a result, the QPS will withdraw all charges against a 28-year-old Victorian man and four male French nationals — aged 29, 30, 32 and 39 — when the matters are brought before Bowen Magistrates Court again on July 30.”

Charges will still proceed against two Victorian women, aged 20 and 22, who took part in the protest.

Shortly after being released from Bowen police station on Monday, Clément expressed his surprise at being arrested.

‘Difficult to understand’
“It’s just difficult to understand why police decided to do that because we are not a danger, we did not block the railway, we are just filming, reporting what is going on here,” he said.

QPS said representatives of all five people had been notified of the decision and that it would make no further comment on the matter as it remained before the courts.

Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) CEO Paul Murphy said it was “wonderful news”.

Murphy said the union had written to the Premier, Attorney-General and Police Commissioner asking for the charges to be dropped.

“It was such a bad look for Australia and it is great news that common sense has prevailed,” Murphy said.

“It seems extraordinary they were not given the opportunity to be informed that they were on private land and given the opportunity to move on.

“They were simply arrested and then had these extraordinary bail conditions imposed on them, it was completely wrong.”

He said he could not recall a previous occasion when journalists had been charged while covering a protest.

“But coming from the back of the recent AFP raids on the ABC and a News Corporation journalist, it certainly is a worrying time in Australia for press freedom,” he said.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Pacific Media Watch Newsdesk

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has called on the Australian authorities to drop all charges against four French TV journalists who – in what RSF called an “unacceptable attack on investigative journalism” – were arrested yesterday while filming environmentalists protesting at a coal terminal near the Great Barrier Reef in northeastern Australia.

The four journalists, who work for the French public TV channel France 2, were held for seven hours after being arrested about 7am while filming two women protesters who had chained themselves to the rail line leading to the Abbot Point deep-water coal port in north Queensland.

The journalists – reporter Hugo Clément, producer Guillaume Durand and cameramen Clément Brelet and Victor Peressentchensky – some of whom were handcuffed at the time of their arrest, were charged with “trespassing” on the rail line although, unlike the protesters themselves, they were not on the line.

READ MORE: Earlier Pacific Media Watch report

“The France 2 journalists were doing their job in a completely legal manner in a public space, so their arrest on this spurious charge was the kind of arbitrary procedure more typical of an authoritarian regime,” said Daniel Bastard, head of RSF’s Asia-Pacific desk.

“We call on the Queensland authorities to immediately drop these absurd charges against the four journalists. Recent repeated press freedom violations in Australia raise questions about respect for the rule of law.

“If nothing changes, Australia has every chance of falling several places in RSF’s next Press Freedom Index.”

Reporting ban
The France 2 journalists were released on bail at around 2pm pending a hearing scheduled for September 3.

The release order specifies that they are banned from being within 100m of any property owned by the Adani Group, the Indian transnational that owns the rail line and coal terminal, and within 20 km of the Adani Group’s Carmichael coal mine, 500km south of Abbot Point.

“The link between our arrest and this ban is the Adani Group, which runs the mine,” Clément told RSF.

“The police went straight for us this morning. They clearly didn’t want us filming the protest. And now we are banned from covering this story, which says a lot about the influence that big private-sector corporations wield.”

Adani launched the Carmichael mine in 2014 with the support of the federal and Queensland governments with the aim of turning it into the world’s biggest coal mine.

It would take a heavy environmental toll because it includes the construction of a channel leading to Abbot Point that would destroy part of the Great Barrier Reef.

The French crew was covering the story for “Sur le Front”, a France 2 series on environmental issues.

Major violations
Press freedom in Australian has been badly undermined in recent years by the concentration of private media ownership in ever fewer hands, impacting pluralism.

It was dealt two major blows last month in the form of federal police raids on the home of a political journalist in Canberra and on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s headquarters in Sydney, in unrelated cases.

And it was reported earlier this month that the federal police had demanded that the Australian airline Qantas surrender its records of an ABC journalist’s travel arrangements as part of its investigation into a leak.

Australia is ranked 21st out of 180 countries in RSF’s 2019 World Press Freedom Index, two places lower than in 2018.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz