Thank you very much for opening this space to us. I was here in March 2012 as a journalist, and I spoke to the MPs. I told them how hard it was for journalists who worked in Honduras in 2009, after the coup, especially when we were covering community-based, grassroots organizations or movements and indigenous organizations among the different first nations people, especially when we saw the actions by different companies in the extraction and mining sector, as well as the tourism sector.
On June 20 last year, I came back to Canada requesting asylum after having survived two violent firearms attacks against my life. Many journalists in Honduras have been attacked during the last two years. Some of them have died violent deaths. Statistics say that there are 59 journalists and communicators who have had threats against their lives.
I am being protected by this federation and by the Province of Quebec. I have been heard in different hearings. In Honduras very few people know that I am here, because there are insecurity conditions where I live in the occidental part of Honduras. There are armed people who have asked where I am, in the village where my mom and my siblings live. Hence, I have not spoken to my colleagues from the Canadian press about my presence in this country.
Honduras is living in a terrible security situation. The inter-American human rights system has put in place 46 precautionary protection measures for different people. Of these measures, 34% are for men and women who work in the field, one of the most dangerous areas of the work that journalists undertake.
Several of those measures have been put into place to protect journalists and communicators: 46% for communicators and 7% for other people. There is 6% for different sexual orientations. Since May last year, we have had 60 requests for protection. Most of the requests are individual. Most of them come from defenders of human rights and political rights, but there are also different journalists as well as three justice activists who have requested protection.
The problem with our system, as Felipe mentioned, is that Honduras as a state grants only one place to the person who has requested defence. However, there have been 16 years of a procedure of cleansing. Honduran people do not trust the system. We have seen this process more and more during the last eight years.
The government has also created a system where there is no journalistic freedom, especially for alternative measures or independent journalists.
For example, a law has been passed in regard to professional secrets whereby in order to avoid the public accessing that information, different institutions have been put in charge of protecting it. However, we believe that what they're trying to protect is public information—information to which the public should have access. There has been a reform of the Criminal Code to create a defence of terrorism. There are actual direct clauses that limit the publication of information in both traditional media and social media.
I would like to be there, to be able to work free of fear, free of the net that Bertha explained to you, where there's a linkage between the armed forces, the military forces, public institutions, and the unofficial armed forces. We see the institutions and the authorities complicit in all of this, because they either don't do anything to stop it or because they're just part of it. We would like to see countries such as Canada, countries who have a good long-standing relationship with our country and who have investments in the country, do something to make sure that free, prior, and informed consent is respected and that the human rights of the population are respected.
I would like to thank you for hearing me and giving me the opportunity to be here today.