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The AEJ is active across the continent
of Europe. Please visit its website, www.aej.org,
and check AEJ Newsletters
for information about what it is doing for its members |
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Remarks by William Horsley at the FPA & AEJ Joint
Anniversary Reception 11
Carlton House Terrace, 30 October 2008 |
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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. |
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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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