Outgoing OSCE media watchdog reports to participating States about deteriorating press freedom

VIENNA, 11 December 2003 - The OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media, Freimut Duve, today strongly criticised a deterioration in media freedom in many OSCE participating States in his final statement to the OSCE Permanent Council before leaving office this month.

"The new media openness of the mid-1990s in some states has been replaced by nervousness, self-censorship and a constant fear of oppression," he said. "As a result of a shift in priorities among the OSCE participating States, civil liberties, including freedom of expression, were pushed to the sidelines by what many countries believed were more pressing concerns."

Mr. Duve was making his last official report to the Permanent Council, the OSCE's main regular decision-making body, after serving two three-year terms as the first OSCE media watchdog. He was appointed in 1997 at the Sixth Ministerial Council in Copenhagen.

During his tenure, Mr. Duve, a German politician, publisher and human rights activist, visited almost all of the 55 participating States in the OSCE and issued hundreds of reports and statements. He has raised the plight of journalists in dozens of countries.

Six years ago, he recalled, it seemed that media freedom had taken hold in almost all OSCE participating States.

"We did not foresee that in the following six years the situation would change and not for the better," Mr Duve said.

"An organisation that used to pride itself on being a community of declared democracies changed its policy outlook in 2003 more towards global threats to security than to its deteriorating human rights record. As I leave the OSCE, the record in some of our participating States concerning freedom of the media is more problematic than when I took this job in 1997," said Mr. Duve.

The OSCE Media Representative announced the establishment of the Veronica Guerin Legal Defence Fund to provide support for journalists who face prosecution in OSCE participating States. The Fund is named after the Irish investigative journalist, Veronica Guerin, who covered organised crime for Ireland's Sunday Independent and was murdered in June 1996.