Reporter’s Memorial

Unveiling of the memorial stone for 2016 and the beginning of 2017

The memorial stone for 2016 and the beginning of 2017 at the Reporters’ Memorial will be officially unveiled in the presence of Christophe Deloire, General Secretary of Reporters without Borders, and close friends and family of journalists Véronique Robert, Stephan Villeneuve, Bakhtiar Haddad and Javier Valdez Cárdenas, all of whom died in 2017.

Stephan Villeneuve and Bakhtiyar Haddad were killed in an explosion on 19 June 2017 while they were filming a report on the battle for Mosul for the magazine programme Envoyé Spécial.  Véronique Robert, who was working with them on the report, died back in France a few days later, on 24 June 2017.

Journalist and writer Javier Valdez Cárdenas was gunned down in broad daylight on 15 May 2017 in the city of Culiacán, capital of the state of Sinaloa.

A highly experienced journalist who was extremely well known in Mexico, Javier Valdez Cárdenas was a specialist in the drug trade. In 2016 he had published a book entitled   ‘Narco Periodismo. La prensa en medio del crimen y la denuncia’ (“Narco-journalism, the press between crime and accusation”). He worked on the nationaI daily newspaper La Jornada, the local weekly Río Doce and had worked for AFP for more than 10 years.

Véronique Robert was a journalist who specialised in conflict zones, and who worked both in television and for the written press in France. She worked with many media organisations in Switzerland and France, including Marianne, Le Figaro and Paris Match, for whom she had recently completed a series of reports on Iraq.

Stephan Villeneuve was a cameraman with the Capa agency in the late 1980s before becoming a freelance video journalist. He covered all the great tragedies the world has witnessed since the 1990s – first Bosnia, then Somalia, Rwanda, Kosovo, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and finally Iraq and Syria.  

The Iraqi Kurdish journalist and fixer Bakhtiyar Haddad had spent fourteen years working for foreign reporters carrying out missions in Iraq.

[su_note note_color=”#AB8B65″ text_color=”#FFFFFF” radius=”0″]In 2016, 74 journalists were killed in the course of carrying out their work. Most of them were deliberately targeted. In 2015 the number was 101. The lower figure is due mainly to the fact that journalists have had no option but to flee from the countries which have become too dangerous for them, and this has been the case particularly for Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan and Burundi. These massive departures have resulted in news “black holes”.
So far in 2017, almost 30 journalists, citizen journalists and people working with the media have been killed. Syria, Mexico and Iraq are among the most murderous countries for the profession.[/su_note]

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Mémorial des reporters
Bd Fabian Ware
Direct access from rue de Verdun

Free admission

© S. Guichard