UNESCO recently announced the official inscription of the Windhoek Declaration in the international Memory of the World Register. Adopted on May 3, 1991, by some sixty independent African journalists gathered in Namibia, this foundational text for press freedom now joins other major historical documents such as the Geneva Conventions and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
On the occasion of this recognition, Alain Modoux, co-founder of the ORBICOM network and a key figure in the process, expressed his great satisfaction and recalled his involvement in this historic event:
The success of the Windhoek seminar on ‘the development of an independent and pluralist African press’ had such an impact on UNESCO that the General Conference asked the Director-General to extend the initiative to other regions of the world, Asia (Alma Ata/Kazakhstan, October 1992), Latin America and the Caribbean (Santiago de Chile, May 1994), the Arab countries (Sana’a/Yemen, January 1996) and Europe (Sofia/Bulgaria, September 1997). So the African seminar in May 1991 played a catalytic role in the democratisation movement that marked the international media landscape throughout the 1990s. It triggered a worldwide dynamic known as the ‘Windhoek process’ and made UNESCO the ‘champion’ of press freedom.
Throughout the 1990s, I was responsible for planning and steering the “Windhoek process” from its inception to its completion, including its diplomatic component. It was obviously with immense satisfaction that I learned, thanks to Sylvie Coudray, of UNESCO’s recent decision to include the Windhoek Declaration in the Memory of the WorlPress released Register, especially as this decision was taken some 30 years after the event! The time that has passed since then is nevertheless proof of the durability of this process!
-Extract from a message from Alain Modoux, co-founder of the ORBICOM network.
To learn more about UNESCO’s documentary heritage : Press release : 74 new entries on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register
[Translated from French with DeepL]
