NEW YORK - The Committee to Protect Journalists wrote to Cuban President Fidel Castro on Wednesday to urge his government to release 23 independent reporters jailed since a March 2003 crackdown on dissents.
The letter from the New York-based watchdog group was endorsed by 108 Latin American writers and journalists,
including novelists Carlos Fuentes and Elena Poniatowska of Mexico and Tomas Eloy Martinez of Argentina.
"We urge the Cuban government to respect international law by allowing journalists to work freely, without fear of reprisal," said the letter signed by the committee's executive director, Ann Cooper.
"With 23 imprisoned journalists, Cuba remains one of the world's leading jailers of journalists, second only to China," the letter to Castro said.
The petition was also backed by former Venezuelan guerrilla and ex-planning minister Teodoro Petkoff, now a newspaper editor and vocal critic of populist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.
It comes almost two years to the day after Cuba arrested 75 dissidents and independent journalists who were convicted of conspiring with the United States against the Cuban government and handed them jail terms of up to 28 years. Only 14 have been released so far.
Cuba's Communist government labels all dissidents as "mercenaries" on the payroll of its archenemy the United States.
However, the committee said the journalists' work was within the parameters of the legitimate exercise of free expression established under international human rights standards.
Some 150 mainly Latin American intellectuals, artists and political activists issued a letter on Monday defending Cuba from being singled out for criticism at the UN Commission on Human Rights, which began its annual session in Geneva this week.
A US-backed resolution condemning Cuba's human rights record is usually presented each year.
The signatories said the US government had no moral authority to criticize Cuba in view of the abusive treatment of terror suspects at prisons in Iraq and the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay.
They included Nobel Peace Prize winners Adolfo Perez Esquivel of Argentina and Rigoberta Menchu of Guatemala, and Nobel laureates for literature Nadine Gordimer of South Africa and Jose Saramago of Portugal.
- REUTERS
