FSM media struggle

By

Susan Prokop

The saga of Sherry O’Sullivan, former editor of FSM News, continues (see “Pressing for freedom” PIM June, 1997).

O’Sullivan was on Guam in early June making plans to establish a new publication, The Micronesia News Magazine, when she received a letter from FSM immigration invalidating her re-entry permit and stating she would not be allowed back into the country.

Copies of the letter were distributed to all airlines and ship ping companies that enter the Federated States of Micronesia.

Nevertheless, the embattled journalist vowed to return and file an appeal with the president, Jacob Nena.

The government, however, seems equally resolved to keep her out. The attorney-general’s office recently issued an eight page memorandum justifying the denial of O’Sullivan’s entry permit, citing various inconsistencies in representations she made to the immigration service when she first arrived in the islands.

The notice came in response to a letter to Nena from the Committee to Protect Journalists, which has taken up O’Sullivan’s cause. The CPJ wrote to the president on her behalf, saying that the effort to expel O’Sullivan was “a blatant violation of the right to ‘seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media regardless of frontiers’ guranteed by Article 19 of the United Nations Declaration of Human

Rights”. ■

O’Sullivan