Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the “Safeguarding Freedom of the Press: The Role of International Law.” Welcome to you all in the room. Welcome also to those joining us virtually from all around the world.
Ladies and gentlemen, I am sure you will all join me in expressing the great admiration upon hearing from Ambassador Markarova. It was humbling and moving in equal measure to listen to her, to see, of course, these past forty-or-so days, the people of Ukraine stand firm for democracy and to stand firm for freedom in the face of Mr. Putin's aggression. Of course, neither democracy nor freedom could meaningfully exist without freedom of expression or absent a free, independent, and fact-based press, which brings us to our subject today.
Today the free press and independent journalists are under attack all over the world like never before. This comes as authoritarian regimes make every effort to suppress the free flow of information so as to control what constitutes the truth itself.
The Nobel Committee chose last year to award its Peace Prize to two remarkable journalists, my friend and client, Maria Ressa from the Philippines, who you will hear from later today, and of course, Dmitry Muratov from Russia. Since that award, the attacks on Maria have not stopped. Dmitry Muratov's Novaya Gazeta has had to suspend publication, all the while disinformation is spreading like a plague.
One of the questions that arise for us as international lawyers, is what role international law plays or ought to play in safeguarding freedom of the press in what is clearly a moment of acute crisis, and that question arises in circumstances where the freedom of expression is enshrined as a right in international law, protected by treaty, set out in international covenants amongst all other regional human rights treaties, but that right needs to be seen against a practical reality whereby that right is being violated more now than ever before.
What we are going to discuss today is several aspects of this issue, and we are going to approach it from multiple perspectives. A part of our focus will be on the work of a new multilateral international state initiative, the Media Freedom Coalition, a coalition of just over fifty states, currently co-chaired by Canada and the Netherlands. Those states have, in turn, established the independent High Level Panel of Legal Experts on Media Freedom, chaired by Lord Neuberger of Abbotsbury, the former president of the United Kingdom Supreme Court.
I serve as one of two deputy chairs to that Panel, and I am delighted to have join us today, my fellow Panel members, Hina Jilani on my right, Dario Milo on my far right, and Karuna Nundy, on my immediate left. I am also extremely pleased that we are joined today by Jeffrey Marder from Global Affairs Canada, to the right of Hina Jilani, and to my very left, David McCraw from The New York Times.
I want to start, Jeffrey, with a question to you. Could you tell us a little bit more, please, about this Media Freedom Coalition, why it was created, what it seeks to achieve?
