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Remarks by William Horsley at the FPA & AEJ Joint Anniversary Reception

 

11 Carlton House Terrace, 30 October 2008

 

Thank you very much, Nazenin, and very well said. I hope the Foreign Secretary joins us and that he will be able to respond to your comments about the real need for more access for foreign correspondents here in London to good information from the British government. I will be brief.

 

On behalf of the Association of European Journalists, congratulations to the Foreign Press Association, and to your director Christopher Wyld, on the excellent and newsy refurbishment of this building – Happy Birthday to You!

 

And the same to us! We have now been going for 40 years in Britain, though not as long as the branches in Italy and Germany where the AEJ was first born in the 1950s. Today we've had telegrams – OK, they were emails – from Brussels and Rome and Dublin to wish us well. 

 

Some of you may not have heard of us before. We are small compared to our co-hosts today, the FPA, but I see many public figures and politicians here tonight who have been our guests at professional lunches, so thank you too. And a special welcome to AEJ's founder members who are here tonight – Don Hatwell and Roger Broad. And to Kevin d'Arcy, who gave, dare I say it, some of his best youthful years to leading the AEJ until just a few years ago. And especially to our current secretary, and webmaster extraordinary, Celia Hampton.

 

That's enough PR. Except to say that the AEJ usually meets at least once a month with movers and shakers from around Europe, courtesy of the European Parliament which lets us use their offices in central London for our meetings. The meetings are open to all media people who want to know more about what's going on Europe. And we don’t do propaganda or evangelising, I can promise! 

 

I'll keep you for a moment longer to say just one other thing that is quite important.  This is an evening of celebration for two journalists’ organisations. But in many parts of the world – some of them countries where FPA members come from or are sending their reports to – the media are not free to inquire or to report the truth about the actions of governments. The murders of Hrant Dink in Turkey and Anna Politkovskaya in Russia caused outrage, but on a recent count at least two journalists or media workers around the world are being deliberately killed every week just for doing their job.

 

 

Freedom of expression for ordinary people is severely limited in very many countries – as you'll know if you've read any of the detailed reports by Freedom House, or the International Press Institute – or indeed our own reports on the AEJ website - www.aej-uk.org

 

Are we in Britain perhaps too wrapped up with scandals about BBC presenters behaving badly to really care? The OSCE's Representative on Freedom of the Media has warned about what he calls a meltdown of OSCE commitments on media freedom and the rule of law – he means freedom from violence and from state controls – in some of the OSCE member states in Europe. Things may not be so pretty in Britain but they have grown really alarming in other parts of our own continent.

 

Which is ironical. Because not only will the world mark the anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall in just ten days' time, on 9 November. But next year will mark 20 years since those dramatic events and the end of the Cold War, which was taken as a historic and irreversible triumph of free speech and free political choices and the start of a new age of harmony.

 

Now there are serious new tensions, a shooting war earlier this year at the edge of Europe and, as the OSCE and the Council of Europe have both said, that victory for freedom now looks far from secure. So now I think Britain – both the government and the media – have a duty to set an example of government openness and high professional standards by the media here at home. And not to forget that limits on free expression in other places have a habit of coming back to us here sooner or later in unwanted ways. Journalists, the freedom of journalists, are as someone said like the canary in the mineshaft – a warning that we may be running out of air. 

 

My all-time favourite theatre play is Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, in which two tramps, Pozzo and Lucky, are roped together and endure times of crisis and hope and despair. I sometimes think that governments and the media are like those two, always roped together, blaming one another but in the end dependent on one another, through good times and bad. They are an “odd couple”.

 

But I want to end by toasting another odd couple – the FPA and the AEJ. Please join me in wishing Happy Birthday to us both!

 

 

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