World Press Freedom Day

  Tuesday, 6 th  May 2025; Arrival and networking (tea and coffee provided):  1330 – 1400; Presentation and Panel Discussion:  1400 – 1530. Location:  Egmont Palace, Brussels, Belgium. Journalists should be able to rely on the law to protect them against threats and attacks – but increasingly, laws are being used to suppress independent journalism, including laws that have little to do with freedom of expression. Building on the ongoing work of the Media Freedom Coalition, a partnership of governments that promotes media freedom alongside civil society organisations, a panel of legal experts, and UNESCO, this session will ask: how can governments and other actors promote accountability for crimes against journalists, and fair trials when journalists themselves are charged with crimes? The session will feature case studies of initiatives such as trial monitoring by embassy representatives, recent research into a proposed international task force to investigate c...

  Media freedom in Slovenia continued to decline in 2021 under pressure from the government of Prime Minister Janez Janša. The country saw the seventh highest number of alerts on the MapMF platform with 29 alerts and 41 attacked persons or entities related to media, leading the Media Freedom Rapid Response (MFRR) to launch an online fact-finding mission in May to assess the situation. Increasing pressure on independent journalism during this time centred on the financial suffocation of the Slovenian Press Agency (STA) and increasing political in‐ terference at the public broadcaster. Con‐ cerningly, many of these violations were recorded while Slovenia held the rotating presidency of the Council of the EU.  At the beginning of the year, UKOM, the Government Communications Directorate, suspended the financing of the STA for the second time in three months, in what media rights groups called an attempt to destabilise the agency through financial blackmail. The PM and leading...