The Bhutanese Leading the way.
The National Commission for Women and Children (NCWC) sent a media directive to all media houses on September 7 titled ‘Safeguarding Minor Privacy and Preventing Indirect Identification.’ The Directive rests its legal basis on the Child Protection Act 2011.
It says that, with immediate effect, all media houses and journalists must strictly adhere to the reporting parameters set by the directive when covering stories involving minors.
It says, ‘When reporting on sensitive incidents involving minors, reporters and editors must refrain from naming specific schools, class levels, or exact Dzongkhags where doing so narrows down the institution to a recognizable few.’
The directive saying that even Dzongkhags cannot be mentioned when it comes to crimes against children will be a major challenge for media houses.
Asking for Dzongkhags not to be mentioned is also not in keeping with the Child Protection Act of Bhutan 2011 (CCPA). Section 30 only prohibits the name, picture, address, school or any particulars of the child that may lead to the identification of the child. The section does not mention Dzongkhags.
This is not the only legal problem with the Directive. The Directive says, “Section 21 of the CCPA strictly protects the privacy and identity of children involved in sensitive incidents, disciplinary matters, or legal proceedings.”
However, the actual Section 21 of the CCPA, titled ‘Protection of Child Privacy,’ says, ‘A child’s right to privacy shall be respected at all stages of legal proceedings including the investigation by any agency.’
The actual legal section has no mention of disciplinary matters, which are related to schools and are not covered by the section meant for courts and the police.
The misinterpretation of this section by the NCWC may hamper reporting by newspapers on incidents in schools.
This reporter talked to a senior lawyer about the directive, and the senior lawyer said that the directive is ultra vires, as it has provisions that are not in the CCPA Act and these provisions run contrary to the freedom of the press guaranteed in the Constitution.
Another problematic part of the directive is that it puts the liability for third-party comments on the media.
The directive says, ‘Media outlets publishing online or via social media platforms must actively monitor public comments to prevent third parties from revealing the identities of minors in response to published stories.’
Here, the lawyer said this directive is trying to place responsibility for third-party content and comments on media houses, which is not correct. He said media houses can remove sensitive content once it is known or brought to their attention, but they cannot be held responsible when they are not aware.
There is also the issue of conflict of interest, as the NCWC Secretariat is now a division under the Education Ministry since 2022, and it has been understood that the media directive was drafted by the Secretariat and later signed by the NCWC Chairperson, who is the Cabinet Secretary, Dasho Kesang Deki.
The human resources, pay, and even the Individual Work Plan targets and assessment of the NCWC staff are handled by the Education Ministry.
In fact, a September 6 press release by the Ministry of Education says the ‘Women and Child Division (NCWC Secretariat) will coordinate with the NCWC to look into the matter from a child-protection perspective, including concerns relating to the disclosure and public reporting of information concerning students.’
This release indicates that the ministry may have had a hand in the media directive. This also raises the question of whether the intent of the directive is to actually protect children or to protect the image of schools and, by extension, the Education Ministry, with cases of bullying, corporal punishment and abuse coming out in the media.
The concern is that this approach, in the name of protecting children, may end up protecting the perpetrators who commit crimes, the educational institutions that are accountable for what happens on their premises, and indirectly discourage children from coming forward to blow the whistle on abusive situations and acts.
The paper also found that the media directive was not circulated to or endorsed by the NCWC board members to get their views and endorsement, but was only shown to the Chairperson to get her signature. This raises questions about the very legality of the NCWC Media Directive, as it has not been approved by the board.
The lawyer said that, though Section 30 of the CCPA says schools’ names must not be mentioned, it can be overruled if the child victim and the child’s parents or legal guardians decide to come out and name the school in their pursuit of justice and transparency.
The letter has also been copied to the media regulator BICMA for ‘joint monitoring and enforcement.’ Here, the lawyer says this raises more questions, as BICMA is supposed to be an autonomous media regulator, and NCWC cannot directly co-opt BICMA to enforce the directive on the media without properly citing the media laws, consulting BICMA and getting it on board.
An NCWC official, on the condition of anonymity, admitted that it does not have a lawyer who could have gone over the draft, and so it was instead drafted by its programme officers.
The Cabinet Secretary, Dasho Kesang Deki, said that while the NCWC Secretariat drafted the media directive, she had assumed that they would know the legal provisions well. She denied that the Education Ministry had a direct role in the drafting of the directive, saying that instead she had been pushing the NCWC Secretariat to do more for child protection and that they are in dialogue with many stakeholders.
She said she edited the original draft to make it more media-friendly and not to make it appear like an attempt to curtail press freedom.
On the issue of not naming Dzongkhags, she said it does not mean that the media cannot name Dzongkhags, but only in certain cases where it may identify the child.
She said the media can name schools if the victim and the family want to do so.
The Cabinet Secretary said the media directive mentions that the NCWC, in collaboration with media regulatory partners, will convene a Joint Media Sensitization Session on ethical reporting boundaries in the coming weeks, and that media houses can raise any issue with the directive, including legal ones. She said they will be open to feedback.
