RECORDED WEBINAR:
from September 15, 2020 10:30 am (ET)
Hosted by: Press Freedom Canada. The Canadian Commission for UNESCO is partnering with us for the event, which is sponsored by the Canadian Bankers Association
Speaker: Maria Ressa, Filipino journalist, whose Rappler online publication has drawn the ire of President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines. She is now battling legal charges which press freedom advocates have condemned as a trumped-up effort to silence her and her publication.
Topic: Ms. Ressa will provide a keynote address on “Growing Threats to Media Freedom. Democracy under Assault.”
Panel Discussion: Following Ms. Ressa’s address, WPFC’s vice-president Heather Bakken will moderate a panel of experts on how democratic governments should respond to the growing threat against a free press. Ms. Ressa will be joined by Irwin Cotler, former Canadian justice minister and chair of Montreal’s Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, and Rachel Pulfer, executive director of Journalists for Human Rights.
Why: Human rights lawyer Amal Clooney recently observed that “abuses of media freedom around the world are stifling speech and shredding the very fabric of democracies.”
Across the globe, courageous journalists are standing up to autocrats and dictators who undermine, intimidate, threaten and even imprison media workers who seek to hold them to account.
Democratic governments, meanwhile, are grappling with how to respond to the growing number of leaders who trample the human rights of journalists to silence them. Some legal experts have recommended that sanctions should be imposed on the worst abusers.
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