Parliament sitting postponed to 5:00 pm

The Parliament’s secretariat announced that the extraordinary sitting scheduled for Tuesday has been postponed to 05:00 pm, as protests remain ongoing outside the Parliament Building with the legislative assembly set to take a vote on a contentious media bill that seeks to replace the existing self-regulatory system with a government-controlled commission.

In a message sent at around 01:00 pm, the Parliament’s secretariat informed lawmakers that Tuesday’s extraordinary sitting will begin at 04:00 pm.

“The agenda will be shared later,” reads the statement.

In a subsequent message at around 03:00 pm, the Parliament informed lawmakers the sitting had been postponed to 05:00 pm.

It still has not shared the agenda for the sitting.

On August 18, Thulhaadhoo MP Abdul Hannan Aboobakr, an independent lawmaker aligned with the government, submitted a bill that seeks to dissolve the Maldives Media Council (MMC) and the BroadCom, replacing them with a single regulatory body — a seven-member Maldives Media and Broadcasting Commission (MMBC), composed of four members elected by the media and three appointed by the President of the Maldives with parliamentary approval, with the President also given the authority to appoint the commission’s head. It also empowers the MMBC to impose major penalties against media outlets as well as individual journalists, including during the investigative stage.

The bill, widely panned both local and international journalism groups, is openly backed by the People’s National Congress (PNC) administration. The Parliament went into recess on August 19, but has been holding extraordinary sittings and committee meetings to work on the bill.

Meanwhile, a petition signed by 151 journalists from 41 different media outlets demanding the withdrawal of the bill was rejected by the Petitions Committee on Tuesday afternoon, after the committee voted 7-5 that the concerns raised in the petition had been addressed.

Despite the widespread concerns over the legislature’s implications on press freedom and freedom of expression, the Independent Institutions Committee passed the bill with multiple government-drafted amendments proposed by the committee’s deputy chair, Kelaa MP Abdulla Shareef on Monday late afternoon, as journalists and opposition lawmakers broke out in protest.

While the Parliament has yet to share the agenda for the sitting, multiple parliamentarians from the ruling People’s National Congress (PNC) told Sun that they plan on using their supermajority in the Parliament to push through the controversial media bill during Tuesday’s sitting.

A crowd of protestors, most of them journalists, have been gathered outside the Parliament Building since the morning in protest of the expected passage of the bill, amid heavy police presence.

There have been several incidents of confrontations between the police and protestors during the ongoing demonstration, as riot police pushed back protestors and dragged others from the sit-in demonstration, resulting in injuries.