High level Dialogue on Press Freedom and the UN Plan of Action on Safety of Journalists and the Issue of Impunity.

Why to raise awareness and strengthen political and diplomatic commitment?

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Strengthening democracy and media freedom and pluralism in Europe.

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  While there were hundreds of alerts across Europe in 2021, there were also positive developments that were welcomed by media freedom actors . In the beginning of the year, the European Commission announced the establishment of an Expert group against SLAPPs with a specific mission to advise the Commission on matters related to fighting SLAPPs or supporting the journalists and media outlets that were targeted by them. ECPMF's legal advisor Flutura Kusari is also a part of this group and the EC is expected to propose legislative and non-legislative measures to counter SLAPPs.  The President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, announced the details of a new Media Freedom Act during her annual State of the Union speech on 15 September. In that same month, the Commission adopted a Recommendation to Member States to improve the safety of journalists, both on-line and offline . It called for the creation of independent national services to support journalists i...
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The deployment of Invasive technology against journalists and other media actors.

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  In 2021, the Fidesz government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban continued its steady erosion of media pluralism. As part of global revelations, an investigative reporting project meanwhile unearthed the surveillance of multiple Hungarian journalists using the Pegasus spyware developed by Israeli spyware firm NSO Group, leading to fresh concerns about the illegal surveillance of journalists and their sources . Hungary was the only country in the EU in which the state intelligence agencies were suspected of tar‐ geting their own nation’s journalists. The 12 alerts recorded on the MapMF plat‐ form, and 47 attacked persons or entities related to media , do not reflect the true scale of the challenges facing media freedom in Hungary, which continued to be among the lowest of the EU member states. Unlike other EU states, however, the state/government was the source of 50% of documeted alerts, indicating the continued pressure by the Fidesz party on independent media.  On 18 July...
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Journalists and media actors face several different types of attacks.

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  Journalists and media actors sometimes even fac e several types of attacks at the same time, such as a verbal and a physical attack performed within the same incident by the same aggressor. In this section we show how many alerts involved a certain type of attack.   The types of attacks are grouped into 5 main types with detailed information provided below:        Physical: In more than 1 out of 5 incidents (21.1%, 132 alerts) media actors were physically attacked. In 49 incidents (7.8%) media actors were injured. Three journalists were killed: the investigative journalist Peter R. de Vries in the Netherlands, the television reporter and veteran crime reporter Giorgos Karaivaz in Greece, and the local radio presenter Hazım Özsu in Turkey.  Verbal: In more than 4 out of 10 incidents (41.1%, 257 alerts), media actors were verbally abused. This includes intimidation/threatening (25.2%, 158 alerts), insult/ab‐ use (78 alerts), discrediting (32), hara...
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