2023-09-14 19:48 update: 2023-09-15, 21:10
Wojciech Surmacz. Photo PAP/Wojciech Olkuśnik
Despite the fact that a majority of members of the European Alliance of News Agencies (EANA) voted on Thursday in favour of expelling the Russian agency TASS, the required number of votes was not reached. "We will not give up and will continue to fight together with Ukrinform," said Wojciech Surmacz, president of the Polish Press Agency (PAP).
In a secret ballot at the EANA General Assembly in Paris on Thursday, 14 news agencies voted to expel TASS from the organisation, 11 voted against and four abstained. The motion to expel TASS was submitted by the Ukrinform agency; a similar motion was submitted by PAP at the end of February 2022.
According to EANA's statutes, a three-quarters majority of the agencies present at the General Assembly is required to expel a member from the association, which consists of 32 European agencies, including PAP.
"The majority of EANA members do not want TASS in the organisation. This is a completely different situation from Sarajevo (the extraordinary EANA meeting in May 2022), where only 6 agencies voted in favour of expelling Russia's TASS," Surmacz noted.
In his statement in Paris, TASS First Deputy Director General Mikhail Gusman referred to a letter he had sent to all news agencies before the meeting, but neither PAP nor Ukrinform received such a letter.
Gusman argued in Sarajevo that TASS was a reliable, professional and independent agency. He referred, among other things, to conversations with the US, Polish and German ambassadors in Moscow, who reportedly had no reservations about the reliability of the information provided by TASS.
After the event, PAP verified Gusman's speech, including with regard to his conversations with the diplomats. His words were denied by the US side and by the Polish ambassador to Russia, Krzysztof Krajewski. The German embassy in Moscow did not respond to PAP on the matter.
PAP sent a report on the verification of the content of Gusman's speech in Sarajevo to all EANA member agencies, including TASS.
It is necessary to amend the organisation's statutes to deal more effectively with similar challenges, the outgoing EANA President Clemens Pig said, calling for an extraordinary General Assembly later this year.
In May 2022, an extraordinary meeting in Sarajevo failed to gather the majority needed to expel the Russians from EANA. In the end, TASS was only suspended from the association. (PAP)
mrf/
