World Press Freedom Day

  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...

  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...