Global Forum for Freedom of Expression

This initiative gathers free expression advocates and practitioners from around the world, and opens a space for them to: exchange skills, ideas, and best practices; establish strategies and techniques for working in repressive and dangerous environments; build opportunities for communication and cooperation with other actors; and create new links and relationships with others to foster the long-term construction of a global community of those working to promote and protect free expression.

As an international network of media and free speech organisations, IFEX is drawing on its own connections - as well as its technical, knowledge, and strategic resources - to facilitate the sharing of expertise between resource-rich and resource-poor participants. The Global Forum on Freedom of Expression will gather activists from different regions and sectors, from different professions and cultures, working with different problems and in different political contexts, but joined by a common interest in the freedom of expression. In addition to political actors, practitioners, and advocates, the forum will gather a number of intellectuals and academics. The hope is that a non-euro-centric selection of practitioners and academics will, when combined with a high academic standard and global profile, help move the forum beyond cultural polemics and contribute to a more productive global debate on the freedom of expression.

Conference sessions will aim to join free expression's theory and practice in an exploration of assumptions surrounding this fundamental right, and a critical engagement with the most pressing challenges posed by today's global realities. Keynote lectures by thinkers in the field will be delivered at the end of each day, in order to facilitate participation by the Norwegian public. Throughout the week, the Forum will highlight the convergence of free and artistic expression through a series of exhibitions and performances. Theatre, concerts, photography, and literature will bring art and politics together in a public space of free expression from Oslo’s waterfront, to the city centre to the Castle Park.

Interactive, hands-on training workshops will run continuously throughout conference days and will deliver applied skills training to small groups (10-15 people) in various languages. The practical sessions will focus on the creation of non-governmental organisations (NGOs), security training for journalists, legal training in Freedom of Information laws, technical training in the circumnavigation of internet censorship, and the like. Those interested in campaigning and advocacy will take part in sessions highlighting issues such as the use of specific international mechanisms and specific campaigning elements - with an emphasis on strategies, heuristics, and lessons learned. Other sessions will focus on how to investigate violations of free expression, and use information about violations to mobilise activist communities.

The forum will also facilitate the creation of ad-hoc and informal advocacy networks that are thematically or geographically driven, creating communication platforms and learning mechanisms for the sustainability of these networks.

Rights.

Organisers explain that - while there is unprecedented global access to information, media, and technologies of expression - "one-third of the world's countries today impose severe restrictions on free expression in general and media in particular, and leading international organizations report negative trend lines on virtually all fronts of the fight for this fundamental right. Over the last ten years more than 1,000 journalists and media support staff have died trying to cover news in 96 countries. Simultaneously, international mechanisms to protect this freedom have been polarized by debates on its relationship to religious dignity and national security, and new geopolitical developments have led to an environment in which international pressure is increasingly ineffective against the worst violations of press freedom and press safety."

In this context, organisers argue, the roles and capacities of local actors are of crucial importance, and connectivity across borders can have an impact on local action, contributing to advocates' capacities, legitimacy, and security.