The Council for the Observation of Ethical and Deontological Rules in the Media (CORED) announced on Wednesday the temporary closure of its offices located at the Maison de la Presse Babacar Touré in Dakar. The decision, made public through an official communiqué, is motivated by persistent financial difficulties which hamper the smooth functioning of the institution. According to the CORED, this closure, decided ” until a new order “, follows the impossibility for the Bureau to continue to face the operating costs, due to the budget allocated for the financial years 2024 and 2025. The permanent staff, recruited for the Secrétariat général, would have endured up to 14 mois d’arriérés de salaires before this measure was finally acted upon. The self-regulatory body, which has been working for more than a decade for the respect of journalistic ethics in Senegal, points to the non-payment of allocations provided by the Fonds d’appui et developpement de la presse (FADP), as stipulated in the Code de la Presse at articles 46 and 53. The exhaustion of additional resources has rendered the daily management of the organisation, which is also largely run by volunteers in its Bureau, its Management and the Tribunal des pairs, unsustainable. Despite this closure, the CORED wishes to reassure on the continuity of its monitoring and regulation missions, while appealing to the competent authorities for a rigorous application of the law to guarantee the perennity of media self-regulation, considered as an essential pillar of democracy.
Temporary closure of the CORED offices: an alert on the precariousness of self-regulatory bodies
