Rachel Pulfer is the executive director of Journalists for Human Rights.
Earlier this month, the third annual gathering of the Media Freedom Coalition was held in Tallinn, Estonia, to discuss strategies to protect journalists worldwide. The issue has never been more relevant. With shifting geopolitics shutting down entire media sectors in Myanmar and Afghanistan, and war looming in Ukraine, action on protecting journalists is urgently needed.
With 50 members countries, the Media Freedom Coalition represents in theory a powerful force for good for journalists worldwide. Founded three years ago by then-Canadian foreign minister Chrystia Freeland and then-British foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt, it launched in London amid a blaze of raised expectations to meet a serious and growing global need.
The threat against journalists is real. Each year, mounting numbers of journalists are both killed and imprisoned in the line of duty. With the brazen murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, politicians joining the coalition in 2019 agreed governments needed to do their part to protect the truth tellers in their societies. This was particularly salient for democracies, given the integrity of democratic outcomes depends on an informed electorate making fact-based decisions about which candidates to support.
It’s high time that the Media Freedom Coalition mobilize the ideas and networks it has invested so much time in generating.
Apart from its annual conferences, the bulk of the coalition’s work has been issuing statements, nine in the past three years. It also pulled together a panel featuring legal luminaries Amal Clooney and Canada’s own Irwin Cotler. The panel exists to make recommendations on concrete actions coalition member states can take to better protect journalists. One of the simplest is for member states to provide emergency visas and consular support for journalists at risk and their immediate family members. The time for the coalition to act on supplying emergency visas is now.
A Russian invasion of Ukraine looms, with dire implications for Ukrainian journalists. Yet the international community of non-profits that work on media freedoms continues to stagger under the weight of the Afghanistan crisis. The silence from the coalition on the topic of emergency visas for Afghan journalists is deafening. Countries that pride themselves on mostly-pristine media freedom records at home have proved largely unwilling to open their doors to people whose journalistic work puts them directly in the line of Taliban fire.
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As part of its advocacy to ensure visas for threatened journalists, Dutch organization Free Press Unlimited organized a presentation in the Dutch Parliament by Columbia Law School professor Can Yeginsu addressing MPs and members of the High Level Panel of Legal Experts on Media Freedom. Prof. Yeginsu made the case for emergency visas, highlighting the need to protect democracies from “truth decay” and how members of the coalition should put concrete measures in place to support journalists under threat.
If this coalition is to be regarded by its key stakeholders, journalists, as a serious entity, the correct response to the crises of the moment is that outlined by Prof. Yeginsu: Member states must step up and provide up to 50 emergency visas each for journalists in distress. Further, given the scale of the threat to journalists worldwide, this program should then become an evergreen initiative, renewed every year.
A program of emergency visas is urgently needed for Afghan journalists. Every morning my WhatsApp account blows up with desperate pleas for help from the thousands of journalists still trapped in Taliban-run Kabul. Help may well be needed in a matter of days for Ukrainian journalists. It is still needed for Myanmar journalists. And it will continue to be needed everywhere strongmen populists decide to crassly demonize their journalist critics in ways that inspire supporters to target them with violence.
Acting in concert in this way to actively support and protect journalists is directly in line with what the legal panel recommended to the member states two years ago. To date, no permanent program dedicated to providing emergency visas for journalists exists. A Canadian program takes 250 human rights defenders each year and includes journalists in its eight priority groups. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada has not stated a number of journalists processed in this category, but Journalists for Human Rights’ research shows that likely just one journalist was processed in 2021, an Afghan. That indicates acute need for a separate stream for journalists at risk.
As Russian troops mass on the borders of Ukraine, as Afghan journalists languish in Afghanistan and third countries, access to the safety that coalition members purport to offer journalists remains, for far too many, a months- or years-long immigration nightmare. The time to walk this talk is now. Which country will be the first to step up?
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