CFOM welcomes the decision by the OSCE Ministerial Council to extend the mandate of the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media, Dunja Mijatović, for one year.
The OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media has an early warning function and provides rapid response to serious non-compliance with regard to free media and freedom of expression. The OSCE participating States consider freedom of expression a fundamental and internationally recognized human right and a basic component of a democratic society.
Our International Director’s words
“CFOM sincerely welcomes the decision by OSCE participating States to re-appoint the Representative on Freedom of the Media, Dunja Mijatovic, for a further year beyond the six years that she has already spent as an effective and untiring head of that Office. The multiple serious challenges to media freedom and journalists’ safety within the OSCE region make the Representative’s work vitally important for all of its populations, based on the commitments entered into by all concerned. In view of the OSCE’s character as an organisation based on consensus among its 57 participating states it is a positive sign that her mandate was prolonged despite the lack of all-round agreement on the appointment of a successor to her at the end of her second 3-year term.
Civil society organisations and people of goodwill in every part of the OSCE area recognise the outstanding importance of the work carried out by the Representative in speaking out about urgent problems related to media freedom and seeking to resolve them through constructive dialogue and assistance of many kinds.
Members of the International Press Institute showed their powerful support for the RFOM’s Office by unanimously adopting a Resolution at the recent IPI Congress in Doha. That Resolution urged the OSCE participating States to work together to agree on a nominee who will be committed to robustly fulfilling the mandate of the Office and who may succeed her before the end of the one-year extension of Dunja Mijatovic’s mandate. CFOM fully endorses that sentiment.”
William Horsley is the author of the OSCE Safety of Journalists Guidebook (2nd edition 2014)
23 March statement by OSCE chairperson-in-office Frank-Walter Steinmeier on the election
