On 11 December CFOM’s international director, William Horsley, will speak on ‘Freedom of the Media and impunity of murders of journalists’ at a meeting of experts in Vienna convened by the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media (RFoM), Harlem Desir, and the University of Vienna. The OSCE RFoM has said that his first priority is the safety of journalists and the fight to end impunity for crimes against journalists. The murder in Malta in October of Daphne Caruana Galizia, who wrote extensively about alleged high-level corruption and who had reported threats to her life before she died in a car bomb explosion, has again focused international attention on the urgency of the issues of safety and impunity.
The Vienna meeting will also draw on the recent study by the University of Vienna, which compares and analyses available databases on killings of journalists published by UNESCO and by a range of NGOs and concludes that significant methodological discrepancies among several leading sources of data presents obstacles when attempting to gain a full picture of the realities of the situation.
William Horsley, who will also speak at this event as the Media Freedom Representative for the Association of European Journalists, is the author of the OSCE’s Safety of Journalists Guidebook (2nd edition, 2014) . His full biography is available here.
The Annotated Agenda for ‘Impunity of Murders of Journalists: A Challenge to Media Freedom’ can be seen here.