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...

  The Tow Center for Digital Journalism and Thomson Reuters Foundation (TRF) will share key findings from their recently launched research titled Weaponizing the Law: Attacks on Media Freedom. The research is a first-of-its-kind report that draws on the insights of media law experts and journalists from around the world to provide a global overview of these sweeping threats to a free press. The presentation of the report by Joel Simon, Founding Director of the Journalism Protection Initiative at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, will be followed by a high-level discussion with leading media defence experts, researchers and media freedom experts to be moderated by Antonio Zappulla, CEO of TRF, that will focus on identifying future research and data collection needed to map in more detail the scale, nature and geographic reach of these threats and how they impact journalists and the media ecosystem. This ongoing exploration of global trends will be critical to enab...