Coming back...

Writing a blog while being « on the move » is challenging and I have kept quite few weeks away from my desk. First with a summer university devoted to the “clash or encounter of civilizations” held in Andorra (with experts like Gilles Kepel and Fred Halliday), second with the photojournalism festival in Perpignan, and third a one-week mission in Moscow to present the new CPJ (Committee to Protect Journalists) report, “The anatomy of injustice, on unsolved killings of journalists in Russia since 2000.
A summary of this trip, with U.S. writer Kati Marton and CPJ coordinator of Europe and Central Asia, Nina Ognianova, can be found on the CPJ’s website. It was packed with meetings with journalists, human rights defenders, Western diplomats and Russian officials.
I drew a few lessons from this trip: first, the rediscovery of courage in journalism. Working in the quiet Brussels press environment leads to a form of complacency and shuts off from the tough realities that our best colleagues in other countries are confronted with. Journalists at Novaya Gazeta and in the other few remaining independent media live in an atmosphere of intimidation and impunity that one tends to forget too quickly.
The second lesson is that we need them to try to understand what is happening in Russia. Kremlinology is back in fashion in Moscow, opacity is the rule. And most Russian journalists do their job as stenographers of power. Dissent is again the key to a better flow of information and punditry.
The third lesson is the feeling that the international community has not much leverage on Russian leaders. What can be done from abroad to help independent journalists, protect them, as well as their close friends, the human rights defenders?
The European Union has published guidelines on human rights defenders that apply to journalists but we have discovered that quite a few diplomats of EU members states did not know –or pretended not to know- these guidelines although they are supposed to implement them.
They do enforce some of them though, by talking to human rights defenders, funding projects or attending trials, like the Anna Politkovskaia’s. But seen from the perspective of these brave writers and investigators these efforts, although welcome, do not seem to make a big impression on Moscow’s rulers.
The strategic discussion on how to influence governments and support human rights defenders is a crucial point and should be a priority for NGOs and press freedom groups. Old systems do not work as well. The “realist” approach has become dominant. State institutions seem exclusively focused on bread and butter or military interests, marginalizing human rights even in their rhetoric.
That should be part of our focus in the next blogs: how to use the media in order to shift the balance back towards a more “ethical” foreign policy.