Member News
By William Horsley - 1st January 2010
Over the festive season ePolitix.com is publishing some of the best articles and interviews of 2009 from our sister publication The House Magazine.
In March former BBC journalist William Horsley shared his outrage at the growing list of murdered journalists in Russia.
The foreign secretary David Miliband says the government wants to "bring foreign policy home" by showing how issues like migration and international conflict directly affect people in Britain.
So what of the cold-blooded shooting of a young woman journalist, Anastasia Baburova (pictured), and a leading human rights lawyer, Stanislav Markelov, in a Moscow street in January?
These are the most recent among countless deaths of government critics and inquiring journalists in Russia during the past eight years.
The murders should sound a shrill alarm in London and across the civilised world.
If these crimes are not resolved and those responsible brought to justice, no-one can be surprised if in time Russia succumbs to a state of open terror.
'A state of open terror' is how today's Russia was described by Jens Reich, speaking at a recent meeting in Chatham House to consider what became of press and political freedoms 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Reich was a leader of the pro-democracy movement in East Germany, which brought about the collapse of the communist regime.
He recalled that most of the popular uprisings in 1989 took place without bloodshed, whereas in Russia inquiring journalists are now dying.
He asked politicians and diplomats everywhere to remind the Russian authorities about their "broken promise" to permit freedom of the media.
Violence against journalists is not a "crime as usual", because it undermines a basic institution of democracy, says Miklos Haraszti, the representative on freedom of the media for the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
Haraszti declares that in Russia those responsible for the deaths of journalists now act with impunity, because nearly all such crimes have gone unpunished.
Haraszti voiced his dismay at the quiescence of the western media in the face of this onslaught against their colleagues in Russia and other parts of Europe, where journalists routinely face violence or threats.
The facts about the suppression of dissent and free media in Russia have been documented in detail by international NGOs.
After a flowering of media freedom in the 1990s an almost Soviet-style conformity has been imposed on much of the mainstream media, including TV, radio and newspapers, through various forms of state ownership and harsh media laws.
The stifling of dissent in Russia has been effective and dangerous for international relations.
The director of the leading Levada Centre polling organisation, Lev Gudkov, says that anti-Western sentiments grew rapidly among Russians from the year 2000, when Vladimir Putin became president, as the result of a 'propaganda' campaign on the state-controlled media.
Britain and its EU partners have themselves lost moral authority. The Council of Europe's Commissioner for Human rights, Thomas Hammarberg, says that government decisions have undermined human rights principles with flawed arguments about improved security. In Britain, journalists face the risk of prosecution for new offences under the Terrorism Act.
The Centre for Freedom of the Media (CFOM) has been created as the UK's first university-based research centre to assess abuses of media freedom as well as standards of media independence and truthfulness at home and in other countries.
Its core principle is that legitimate media freedom is vital to sustain civil and political freedoms.
Jens Reich drew some hope from the experience of the pro-democracy movements in 1989.
He said that Russia's leaders may listen to the complaints about their failure to respect media freedom with a poker face, and excuse themselves by saying that it is not their responsibility. Even so, those unceasing protests may in time bear fruit. That is what happened in the Year of Revolutions 20 years ago.
William Horsley is a former BBC journalist and co-founder of CFOM, the UK's Centre for Freedom of the Media at the University of Sheffield.
Dods Parliamentary Communications Ltd