War deaths fuel INSI's UN lobby.

The International News Safety Institute (INSI), the newly formed pressure group whose president is CNN international president Chris Cramer, has called for the Geneva Convention to be amended to make the deliberate or negligent killing of journalists a war crime.The call, from INSI board member John Owen, comes after it emerged last week that the British government would not investigate the killing of ITV News reporter Terry Lloyd, who was killed by "friendly fire" in Iraq, as the incident was not considered a war crime (Broadcast, 16.5.03).Speaking at the Input programme-makers conference in Aarhus, Denmark, Owen, a former Freedom Forum executive director, said the increase in deaths and serious injuries to journalists as a result of so-called friendly fire was worrying.He pointed to the death of journalists in the recent Iraq war, both at the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad, which was fired on by an coalition tank, and at the offices of al-Jazeera, which were hit by a US bomb.Owen said: "Those incidents have yet to be explained properly, including the terrible day when a US tank fired on the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad in the full knowledge it was filled with journalists. These were not just tragic deaths - they were potentially targeted deaths - and there has to be an accounting for what happened, or there will be no deterrent to the killing of journalists elsewhere."It is time to amend the Geneva Convention and make the deliberate killing of journalists a crime of war, along with wilful negligence that results in journalists being killed - such as the incident at the Palestine Hotel."The Geneva Convention is overseen by Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva, Switzerland.