Dear Colleague,

I am writing to you today not in my capacity at the Bar, but as a journalist writing to fellow journalists about the death of a colleague.

On 22 April, Amal Khalil, correspondent of Al-Akhbar, was killed in an Israeli air strike on al-Tayri in southern Lebanon. Her colleague Zeinab Faraj was gravely wounded in the same sequence of strikes. They had taken shelter in a house after an earlier attack on their vehicle. Lebanese authorities have since said that rescue workers were fired upon as they tried to reach her. She is the twenty-seventh journalist killed in Lebanon since 2 March.

Dr Waiel Awwad has, on behalf of the International Association of Press Clubs, issued a statement of condemnation and a call for an independent international investigation. It is a statement that speaks well for our profession, and I stand with it.

In addition, I wish to place before you this. The killing of a journalist in an armed conflict is not only a moral wrong; it is a specific breach of international humanitarian law. Article 79 of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions, UN Security Council Resolutions 1738 and 2222, the Rome Statute, and the customary law binding on all States — each of these provides a framework within which accountability can be sought, not merely demanded. A condemnation can be issued. A legal instrument can be filed.

It is on this footing that I am founding the International Legal Coalition for the Protection of Journalists (ILCPJ), as an initiative of 4C Supreme Law International and the Supreme Court Life Members Bar Association. ILCPJ is a coalition of lawyers and jurists whose mandate is to provide legal protection for journalists in armed conflict.

In the coming weeks, ILCPJ will:

1. Transmit a detailed legal brief on the killing of Amal Khalil to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the UN Special Rapporteurs on Freedom of Opinion, on Extrajudicial Executions, and on Human Rights Defenders, and the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court.
2. File a formal representation before the Ministry of External Affairs, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, and the Press Council of India, seeking coherence with India's existing treaty obligations on the protection of journalists.
3. Convene Indian and international bar associations — beginning with the International Council of Jurists, the World Independent Lawyers League, the Arab Lawyers Union, and the Lebanese Bar Association — to build a standing legal architecture.
4. Approach the Supreme Court of India, should the Union's response prove inadequate, for a National Framework for the Protection of Indian Journalists in Conflict Zones.

I write to ask you two things.

First, if you would lend your name to the founding of ILCPJ, reply to this email with the words "I endorse." That is all that is required. Endorsements from working journalists and editors will be recorded on the coalition's landing page and annexed to our representations and transmissions.

Second, if you hold office in a press club, editors' body, or journalists' union, consider placing ILCPJ's founding before your body and moving a short resolution of support. I will send you a one-page draft resolution on request.

I do not write this letter lightly, and I do not write it from a distance. The terrain in which Amal Khalil was working — the risks, the improvisation, the thin line between witness and target — is not unfamiliar to me. I have reported from Jammu and Kashmir through the years of insurgency, from Afghanistan, from across the Middle East, and from other theatres where the price of filing a story was measured differently than it is in peacetime. I know, from that work, what our colleagues in southern Lebanon are carrying now. I also know, from four decades at the Bar, that when a journalist is killed for her reporting, the loss is not borne by journalism alone. The law has a duty in it, and so do we who practise it. That is what ILCPJ is for.

With regard,

Ajay Kummar Pandey Advocate, Supreme Court of India Founder-Convener, ILCPJ

4C Supreme Law International 615, Indraprakash Building, 21 Barakhamba Road, New Delhi – 110001 Offices: New Delhi | Mumbai |Dubai 
editor.kumar@gmail.com / ajay@ajaykr.com | +91 [9818320572]

ILCPJ's publications, transmissions and legal explainers will appear on the following channels:

Website & Daily News: supremelawnews.com YouTube: [/@4csupremelaw] X (Twitter): [editorkumar] LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/ [ajaykumarpandey1] Facebook: [/editor.kumar] Instagram: @[advocatedrajay] Telegram: @Advdrajay
 

This letter may be forwarded to colleagues. ILCPJ is an open coalition.