Who?

This site is produced by the non-profit "Association to Defend the Independence of Agence France-Presse (ADIAFP)"

The association's aims are to:

• work for the preservation of the French Act of Parliament n°57-32 dated January 10, 1957 laying down the statutes of Agence France-Presse (referred to hereafter as  "the Agency", or AFP);
• pursue an open and democratic campaign against any and all projects seeking to abolish or water down the said statutes, be it by turning the Agency into a state company or by privatising it;
• work towards the drawing-up and implementation of a true General Interest Mission for the Agency, to apply to all its working languages and all its forms of journalistic production;
• campaign for the preservation of the full range of activities laid down for the Agency in its 1957 statutes, ie the collecting, editing and distribution of a complete, objective, precise,  impartial and trustworthy news service;
• support and take part in all public initiatives likely to promote the above-mentioned aims and principles;
• support initiatives seeking to combat excessive concentration in the media sector, and to defend the independence of the press generally.

Why?

AFP's founding statutes, defined by a French Act of Parliament from 1957, are currently threatened by a project commissioned by the government and supported by the agency's chief executive officer, Pierre Louette.

In the document that he handed over to the French government on Marcy 31, 2009, M. Louette expresses a wish to see AFP turned into a "national publicly-funded company", which would have the basic attributes of a joint-stock entity.

For our association, along with the trade unions represented at AFP, such a change would be but a step along the route to a future privatisation, which explains the name of this site. Whatever the outcome, be it as a state-owned firm or a privatised one, AFP would lose its independence, underpinned for over half a century by its current statutes.

A very large number of staff at the agency, along with all their main unions, are opposed to the change of statutes. In November 2008 the AFP unions launched a "petition for the independence and survival of Agence France-Presse".

Our site aims to give added publicity to the fight against a change of AFP's statutes. The importance of this issue goes well beyond the strict framework of trade union activism, and is of great interest to everyone anywhere who cares about freedom of information.

To that end, our site seeks to provide as much information as possible about AFP, and to express the widest possible range of opinions on the issues involved. Major news agencies are often little-known among the general public, but their fates are vital for the free flow of news, and therefore for democracy itself.

Last but not least, www.afp-privatisee-non-merci.org encourages all its visitors to act in defence of AFP. A very simple way to do that is to sign the "SOS-AFP" petition. Another is to join our association, and to do all you can to publicise our cause.

What?

Our site is made up of presentational pages, like the one you are reading now, as well as opinion pieces in "blog" format, which readers are invited to comment on.

To be able to post comments you need to sign up by providing a name and a valid e-mail address. Although we do not forbid our users to hide behind pseudonyms, we encourage you to provide your real name wherever possible.

In order to ensure that comments are relevant ("on topic") and do not contravene legislation on such issues as pornography or incitation to racial hatred, comments are read before being validated. This entails a slight delay before publication, which we do our best to keep as short as possible.

Jean-Michel Cadiot and David Sharp, founder members of the ADIAFP - Paris, Thursday September 17th, 2009