PARTY-LIST Rep. Sarah Elago of Kabataan has refiled a bill that seeks to repeal Republic Act 7079, also known as the Campus Journalism Act of 1991, and replace it with a law that “genuinely upholds campus press freedom.”
“The student publication is the tangible expression of campus press freedom. Through it, students are able to practice their rights to freedom of expression and information, rights that are protected by the 1987
Constitution. We are refiling the campus press-freedom bill in the light of the intensifying attacks against our campus publications in recent months,” Elago said.
She cited data from the College Editors Guild of the Philippines (CEGP) that recorded more than 800 cases of campus press-freedom violations from 2010 to 2015.
Of those cases, a total of 322 were related to school administrations’ prevention or denial of the use of funds by campus newspapers, while the rest involved censorship, administrative intervention and harassment.
The latest case involves the Philippine Collegian, the student publication of the University of the Philippines Diliman (UP Diliman), which was not able to print its first issue for academic year 2016-2017, owing to the insistence of the UP administration to abide by a difficult procurement process.
Student publications at the Polytechnic University of the Philippines (PUP) are also currently facing problems, with the PUP administration seeking to establish a “centralized university-wide publication.”
The publication fee per student for The Catalyst, the official PUP student publication, is planned to be cut to only P20 from the current P40.
“The flaws of Campus Journalism Act are being exploited by school administrations to suppress the campus press. They commit offense after offense but suffer no penalty since there is no penalty clause in the current law,” Elago said.
“These violations happen under the guise of unnecessarily tedious bureaucratic processes, which, upon closer scrutiny, are exposed as schemes aimed at silencing student publications printing incisive stories and articles that promote the struggle of the studentry,” the legislator explained.
In the case of the Philippine Collegian, the publication has recently published in-depth and investigative reports critical of the UP’s commercialization and privatization policies, such as the privatized student housing scheme, the Socialized Tuition System (STS) and the e-UP project.
“Such articles have been instrumental in intensifying the campaign against antistudent policies, spurring mass actions not just in UP Diliman but in other UP units, as well,” Elago noted.
Important provisions of the refilled campus press-freedom bill include the compulsory establishment or reestablishment of student publications at all school levels, autonomy of the paper’s editorial board from any form of administrative intervention with regard to the handling of funds, content of articles the editorial board chooses to publish and the selection of publication staff and members.
Section 7 of the campus press-freedom bill also states that “funding for the student publication shall be sourced primarily from student-publication fees collected by the school administration. It shall be mandatory for the school administration to collect student-publication/subscription fees during the enrollment period.”
House Bill 1493 was first filed in the 15th Congress by then-Party-list Rep. Raymond Palatino of Kabataan.