The Foreign Affairs and Portuguese Communities Commission of Portugal’s Assembly of the Republic (parliament) in Lisbon has acknowledged China’s “good faith” concerning its commitments resulting from the Sino-Portuguese Joint Declaration on the Question of Macau, according to a report by the Portuguese newswire Lusa this week.
The commission recently held a meeting in response to a letter signed by 150 journalists who urged the Portuguese parliament to reveal its stance on the situation of press freedom in Macau.
The letter was sent to the lawmakers in the Portuguese capital after half a dozen journalists resigned from Macau’s government-owned broadcaster TDM last month over the management’s alleged move to impose “patriotic” editorial guidelines on them.
Both TDM and the local government have insisted that the station’s editorial guidelines do respect press freedom. However, TDM also underlined in a statement that it provides a public service for the Macau Special Administrative Region (MSAR), while the government said in a separate statement that “all news organisations in Macau have the freedom to set their own editorial guidelines.”
According to the Lusa report, the Portuguese parliament’s commission decided not to take a position on the Macau press freedom row. The report quoted one of the commission members as saying that it would be neither in the interest of Macau and the Portuguese living there nor in the interest of the relations between Portugal and China to “blow up and dramatise this question right now.”
Another legislator was quoted by the report as saying that press freedom was an issue in Portugal “rather than there” (in Macau).
