Catalina Botero: “Those who want to regulate communication, believe that people are stupid”

The Universidad San Francisco from Quito, in the context of academic competition on human rights, invited Catalina Botero, the former special reporter for Freedom of Expression of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

That is the context in which the former reporter offered a conservatory of “Freedom of Expression, challenges in modern times”, with emphasis on Ecuador´s current situation. She is a lawyer, an expert on traditional justice and International Law of Human Rights.

To begin, she mentioned that the situation of freedom of expression in Ecuador is worrisome. “Freedom of expression is not that people can talk, people could speak even in the National Socialist regime, is that there are no reprisals,” she said. Botero thinks that the institutional apparatus, in Ecuador, was designed precisely to avoid prevent self censorship.

In that sense, she believes that public debate does not improve the fact that the government controls much of the media and exerts pressure, through a Superintendency, on the media it does not control. She also noted that “creating institutions within the executive power to control the media is an aberration anywhere in the world” regarding the powers of the Supercom and the government´s influence on the Cordicom.