In order to analyze the socio-political context in which freedom of press takes place in Africa,

the Americas and Europe, we mainly relied on the current regional reports of the NGO

Reporters Without Borders from the years 2018 and 2019.

Reporters Without Borders is an independent NGO based in Paris with consultative statues

at the United Nations, UNESCO and the Council of Europe.

In our discussion, Preparing the Human Rights Talks, we took a region-specific perspective.

However, we also focused on common trends in the freedom of press within the three different

regions.

We would like to present the results of this analysis in the following.

Besides traditional sensitive issues of reporting such as reporting on the topics of corruption,

organized crime or trafficking in arms and drugs, we discovered three overall trends

that recently threatened the work of journalists worldwide.

The first very remarkable new trend regarding dangers for freedom of press in all three

regions is that internet cuts or restrictions on access to online social networks are increasingly

used as censorship tools in order to get dissent formulated by the press.

One example for this is Uganda, where a so-called special security unit was created by the state

to closely monitor websites and social networks.

Apart from state censorship, the internet also poses threats to freedom of press when

journalists become victims of online harassment.

This happened in Brazil, where journalists responsible for investigating electoral frauds

suffered different forms of online attacks in the context of presidential elections in

In Europe, critics of the European Union's copyright directive feared that the required

copyright censorship filter would interfere with freedom of expression by curtailing internet

users' ability to share content.

The second common trend in the socio-political landscape is that state authorities increasingly

refer to the protection of national security and to fight against terrorism in order to

justify interferences with freedom of press.

In Cameroon, for example, public authorities misused an anti-terror law to arrest and threaten

local journalists, critical of the government, although the law was formerly part of the

country's effort to counter the extremist group Boko Haram.

In Nicaragua, in the course of massive opposition protests against President Ortega in the first

half of 2018, journalists were subjected to increased stigmatization.

Some have been jailed on terrorism charges.

Also, in Turkey and the Russian Federation, an excessive use of anti-terrorism legislation

limits media freedom and freedom of expression.

The Commissioner for Human Rights of the Council of Europe reported that in Turkey, for example,

a petition signed by academics calling for the end of violence in southeastern Turkey

continues to result in terrorism-related sentences being handed down by Turkish courts.

The Commissioner also reports that Russian civil society has been ringing alarm bells

about the constant increase in administrative sanctions affecting thousands of individuals,

loggers and media outlets for using materials that the authorities consider to be extremist.

The third overall sociopolitical trend we discussed concerns the dangers of an aggregating

anti-media-authority from state officials and from politicians belonging to far-right

populist parties.

In its 2018 WordPress Freedom Index, Reporters Without Borders discovered that hostility

towards the media and the efforts of authoritarian regimes to export their vision of journalism

pose a threat to democracies all over the world.

Especially in Europe, a new trend discerned by RSF is that hostility towards the media

from political leaders is no longer limited to authoritarian countries.