At the Unesco World Press Freedom Day conference in Helsinki reporters from around the world discussed combating propaganda and protecting rights of civil journalists.
In an age of global challenges to security, rights and freedoms of journalists, the 23rd World Press Freedom Day was held in Helsinki, the capital of Finland, which has the best record on press freedom since 2010 according to the World Press Freedom Index.
Khadija Ismayilova
Khadija Ismayilova, one of Azerbaijan’s most celebrated journalists, will be given the opportunity to appeal against the decision by the Baku Court of Appeal to imprison her.
The appeal will be heard by the Supreme Court of Azerbaijan on 25 May.
Ismayilova has been arbitrarily imprisoned since December 2014 and was sentenced on September 2015 to seven and a half years in prison. Although she is officially charged with large-scale misappropriation and embezzlement, illegal entrepreneurship, tax evasion and abuse of official duties, it is widely believed that the real reason for Ismayilova’s imprisonment is her investigative journalism.
Ukraine is again at the center of an international scandal. On 10 May Ukrainian website Myrotvorets, which publishes personal data of alleged separatists, made public information about the journalists who have been accredited in the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) — the part of Donbas area beyond Ukraine’s government control.
There’s no doubt that Poland’s media landscape is undergoing a rapid transformation. The country’s ranking in the Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index plunged from 18 in 2015 to 47 in 2016. The government rushed through a law in the waning hours of 2015 that gave it oversight of the nation’s public broadcaster. Scores of veteran journalists have lost their jobs.
April 2016 was the busiest month for Index on Censorship’s Mapping Media Freedom since the project began in May 2014, with a total of 87 violations against the media recorded. While MMF records violations from over 40 countries, the majority (55%) of last month’s violations came from just five countries.
L-R Antoine Kaburahe, Melody Patry, Jean-Paul Marthoz, Thierry Chervel, Abdualla Maksour and Rudi Vranckx discuss world wide worries about free reporting
This week’s Difference Day conference in Brussels was all about celebrating press freedom. “Should we instead mourn press freedom?” asked Jean-Paul Marthoz, EU correspondent for the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Mapping Media Freedom documents press and media freedom violations across Europe. The documented incidents are publicly accessible and can be explored, filtered and searched through the interactive Alert Explorer. Quantitative and qualitative analysis providing deeper insights and statistics about the press freedom situation in Europe is published within regular monitoring reports and fact sheets.
This project is run by the Media Freedom Rapid Response (MFRR), a Europe-wide mechanism, which tracks, monitors, and reacts to violations of press and media freedom in EU Member States and candidate countries. This project provides legal support, public advocacy, and information to protect journalists and media workers.
All content available on the Mapping Medea Freedom website is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
