A few days ahead of 3 May, World Press Freedom Day, the 14 partner organisations of the Council of Europe Platform for the Protection of Journalists today publish their annual report and warn that “attacks on press freedom in Europe are at serious risk of becoming a new normal”.
While “a growing pattern of intimidation to silence journalists” was already apparent from the alerts submitted in 2019, the pandemic that has marked the last few weeks has accelerated this trend by provoking “a new wave of serious threats and attacks on press freedom in several Council of Europe Member States”. This is illustrated by the case of the two “biggest jailers”, Turkey and Azerbaijan. One excluded journalists from the April 2020 liberation wave, the other made arrests following “critical coverage of the country’s coronavirus response”. Like Russia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, these two countries also persist in ignoring the platform’s warnings.
Another source of concern are the “fake news” laws adopted in Russia and Hungary, which threaten journalists with imprisonment for violating official discourse, and, more broadly, the laws on the state of emergency in the face of the pandemic, which are conducive to press freedom abuses. “The ongoing crisis demands more urgent and stringent responses to protect media freedom and freedom of expression and information, and to support the financial sustainability of independent professional journalism. In the age of emergency rule, protecting the press as the watchdog of democracy cannot wait.”
See the annual report of the Council of Europe Platform for the Protection of Journalists: https://bit.ly/2Sh6sEK (Original version in French by Véronique Leblanc)