Freedom of the Media

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. [Freimut] Duve [OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media], it is our pleasure to welcome you to the Permanent Council this morning. We have listened to your thoughtful report with great interest. The United States applauds your continuing dedication you bring to preserving freedom of the media and to combating all forms of oppression of journalists.

The 9/11 attacks and their aftermath have transformed the world. The OSCE responded quickly and now we have a new charter on terrorism, which contains commitments that will focus on the work of the OSCE in combating terrorism for years to come. With this said, we should also make sure that the war on terrorism should not be an excuse to infringe on freedom of the media. We welcome the decision of Russian President Putin not to sign the amendments to the Media Law and the Law on Combating Terrorism. We should not compromise freedom of expression under the generic pretext of "national security."

Despite Mr. Duve's office's relentless work, we are witnessing continuous incidents of harassment, arrests, disappearances, and deaths of journalists in the OSCE region. We urge all governments concerned to provide information on the cases at hand.

As we have said in the PC [Permanent Council] before and in recent months, there has been what appears to be a pattern of harassment of Kazakhstan’s independent media. We have frequently raised and will continue to raise our concerns. We continue to be concerned about the journalist Sergey [Duvanov]. We hope that any legal process against Mr. Duvanov will be both transparent and in accordance with international legal standards.

The United States shares Mr. Duve's concerns about the deterioration of media freedom in Belarus. Upon inspecting television stations on December 5, President Lukashenko declared that, "Ideology cannot be privatized. The only requirement for media is to follow the state development concept." This statement is wholly inconsistent with OSCE principles. Meanwhile Victor Ivashkevich, former Editor-in-Chief of the independent newspaper Rabochi, was sentenced to a one-year sentence of "corrective labor," joining two other journalists similarly sentenced earlier this year. Taken together with the recent closure of another independent newspaper, Myestnoye vremya, and the Russian-owned newspaper, Moskovski v Belarusithere, there emerges a pattern of abuses aimed apparently at silencing independent media before March local elections. The U.S. calls upon Belarus to comply with its OSCE commitments by lifting penalties against journalists and independent newspapers allowing them to provide Belarusians with an independent voice.

Separately, we note the anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim comment by the Belarusian Deputy Chairman of the House of Representative Committee for Foreign Affairs, Syarhey Kastsyan. According to the November 25 Belaruskaya Gazieta, he made a remarkable comment, "If a mosque or a synagogue stand in the way of the city development plan, I believe it is ok to bulldoze it." This is contrary to the Ministerial decision arrived at just a week ago on tolerance. We hope that Belarusian authorities will stand by the Ministerial decision that they supported and worked with the U.S. Government to achieve.

In Ukraine, we are concerned by reports that the Ukrainian Government has issued written and oral instructions to media outlets specifying the news content and coverage that is acceptable to government authorities, with the resultant absolutely "chilling effect" on reporting. We urge Ukraine to uphold its OSCE commitments and its legal obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights which provide, inter alia, that the right to freedom of expression protects the "right to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority." We consider a free, independent, and objective media in Ukraine essential for Ukraine's integration into Western institutions.

We welcome Mr. Duve's project on "Freedom and Responsibility: Media in Multi-lingual Societies." In the Ministerial Decision on Tolerance, our Ministers noted that, "promoting tolerance and non-discrimination can also contribute to eliminating the basis for hate speech and aggressive nationalism, racism, chauvinism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism and violent extremism." We emphasize that taking strong positions against hate speech should not undermine support for freedom of expression. It is best to counter hate speech with freedom of speech, because only through the sharing of information can we successfully combat ignorance, prejudice, and intolerance -- which go absolutely hand in hand.

We would like to reiterate our call for an OSCE meeting on NGO [non-governmental organization] access to reliable government information, which we proposed in the October 4 follow-up PC to the Human Dimension Implementation Meeting. Such a meeting will serve well to increase cooperation between journalists and authorities as well as to strengthen the reliability and professionalism of the media. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.