Chafee Backs News Gathering Code

The House of Delegates of the American Bar Association will vote in February on University Professor Zechariah Chafee's proposal to support the U.N.'s plan for the freer international transmission of news.

Chafee reported yesterday that the A.B.A.'s section on International and Comparative Law had backed his position at the Association's convention last week. Chafee headed the Committee on Freedom of Speech and Press of the Bar Association which analyzed the U.N. convention now waiting for action.

In the report, Chafee praises the U.N. Convention for providing "concrete measures to enable foreign correspondents to get into countries more easily, to be immune from expulsion for lawful acts, to have access to news sources without discrimination, and otherwise to work more effectively."

"It prohibits," the Chafee group continued, "peacetime censorship except on grounds of defense, and as to that it forbids the most burdensome practices of censors, such as concealing deletions from the author of a news dispatch and imposing cable charges for the deleted passages."

Chafee noted that "If the News Convention guaranteed complete freedom for foreign correspondents, there would be no hope of its being signed by any of the nations where its provisions are needed. It gives the widest freedom attainable under present circumstances."

Observing that "the treaty contains nothing harmful to the American press or to our citizens generally," the committee defended a French provision on the International Right of Correction. These sections "merely allow a nation objecting to what was said about it by a newspaper of another country to present a statement of its side of the story to the government of that country, which is then obligated to include this corrective statement among its usual governmental press releases.

"Every newspaper is free to print this statement or not, just as it pleases. There is not the slightest compulsion on any newspaper to print anything whatever.

"By Not Asking Too Much"

"By not asking too much, the State Department and the United States Delegates to the U.N. believed there was a reasonable prospect of attracting signers from among nations where existing conditions for gathering and transmitting news are less favorable than the conditions provided by this Convention. What is equally important is to get it signed by nations which today leave correspondents fairly free, and yet there is some danger that these countries might change to a drastic censorship and other severe restrictions. This calamity is less likely to occur if they sign the News Convention. The Convention will help hold the line."

Discussing the World Conference on Freedom of Information, Chafee said, "The most serious controversy at Geneva concerned the proper method for characterizing the kinds of abuses of freedom of speech which might be penalized, if signers of the Covenant thought this necessary.

"The conference adopted the Sub-Commission method of listing separately the types of utterances which a nation might punish without violating the Covenant. It preserved the seven specific limitations (such as 'expressions which incite persons to alter by violence the system of government'), and added an eighth--the so-called Indian amendment-which gave an option to pass laws against 'the systematic diffusion of deliberately false or distorted reports which undermine friendly relations between peoples and States'. For this there is no counter part in the United States, and the amendment was opposed by the American delegate in the Legal Committee, but without success."