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Emilio Gutierrez Soto says he hopes case will spotlight want to guard different journalists ‘risking lives to inform fact’.
Mexican journalist Emilio Gutierrez Soto has received his asylum attraction to stay in the USA, a media advocacy group introduced, greater than a decade after he sought refuge amid threats and a concern of persecution in Mexico.
The Nationwide Press Membership (NPC) stated on Thursday that the Board of Immigration Appeals just lately dominated that Gutierrez – who has been combating makes an attempt to expel him from the US – was eligible for asylum.
“It has been a protracted journey, and these previous 15 years have been tough. However right now, justice has received,” Gutierrez, 60, stated in a statement shared by the US-based organisation.
“I hope that my case will shine a lightweight on the necessity to defend these journalists in Mexico and world wide who’re working and risking their lives to inform the reality.”
Gutierrez is considered one of a number of journalists whose circumstances have drawn consideration in recent times, together with Wall Avenue Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who’s being detained in Russia, and freelance reporter Austin Tice, who went lacking in Syria greater than a decade in the past.
His case additionally shone a highlight on the hazards journalists face in Mexico particularly. The nation has seen an increase in deadly assaults towards reporters, making it one of many deadliest locations to work as a journalist on this planet.
Free speech group Article 19 said in a report in March that Mexican journalists confronted file ranges of harassment, intimidation and violence final 12 months, with one assault towards a media employee recorded each 13 hours.
The NPC has been urgent Gutierrez’s case since 2017, when US officers moved to deport him simply weeks after he accepted the membership’s press freedom award on behalf of Mexican journalists who “are routinely focused by drug cartels and corrupt authorities officers”, it stated.
Gutierrez was 45 when he left Ascension, a metropolis in Mexico’s northern state of Chihuahua, after a supply knowledgeable him that “his reporting on the army’s efforts to shake down locals had made him a marked man”, the press membership stated in Thursday’s assertion.
The Committee to Defend Journalists advocacy group also said in 2018 that if Guterres have been to be despatched again to Mexico, he “would face doable retaliation for [his] previous reporting on corruption within the Mexican army”.
In its decision, dated September 5 and shared by the NPC, the Board of Immigration Appeals wrote that Gutierrez had “a well-founded concern of persecution in Mexico on account of his political opinion and specific social group membership”.
“Consequently, [he] has demonstrated eligibility for asylum,” the board dominated.
Representatives for the Division of Homeland’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark from the Reuters information company.
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