May 2025
May 2-5 World Press Freedom Day
CFOM Researchers travelled to Brussels, Belgium, to take part in the Academic Conference as part of World Press Freedom Day. The UNESCO Chair delivered opening remarks as part of the conference alongside Dr. Tawfik Jelassi (right), Assistant Director-General for Communication and Information, UNESCO and Dr. Vera Slavtcheva-Petkova (left), Associate Dean Global Engagement, University of Liverpool.
The UNESCO Chair and CFOM Researcher, Dr Diana Maynard, along with Free Press Unlimited’s Jos Bartman, hosted a panel as part of the conference. The panel spoke about their project focusing on monitoring. The project aims to improve the understanding of the contextual predictors of lethal and non-lethal violence towards journalists.
As things currently stand, adequate monitoring of attacks against journalists is currently lacking, especially in line with UN SDG 16.10.1, which specifies the categories of killing, kidnapping, enforced disappearance, arbitrary detention, torture and “other harmful acts”.The UNESCO Chair spoke specifically about how different communicative contexts in which journalists operate across the world and are decisive in understanding that attacks on journalists don’t emerge out of thin air. She provided a new typology of four different scenarios in order to better understand and assess the communicative conditions in which journalists are expected to operate.