maryam.omidi@opendemocracy.net's blog

Yesterday was World Press Freedom Day; a day designated by the UN to raise awareness of the importance of freedom of press and remind governments about their responsibility to uphold their commitment to Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

On the menu of events in London was an informal lunch with two of Russia's leading defenders of human and civil rights – Oleg Panfilov, a journalist and Director of the rather alarmingly named Centre for Journalists in Extreme Situations and Tatiana Lokshina, Chair of the DEMOS Centre for Information and Russian journalism. With the death of several journalists over the course of the past year, most notably Anna Politkovskaya and Ivan Safronov (whose recent plummet from a fifth-floor window was masqueraded as an act of suicide), the question of press freedom in Russia is a particularly pertinent one. In total, Reporters Without Borders, states that 21 journalists have been killed since Vladimir Putin's election in 2000. But Mr Panfilov's figures are closer to 20 a year. Even though, he stresses, not all of these deaths can be directly linked to the government, they are an important indication of the prevalence of violence in Russia today.

For Mr Panfilov, the absence of a tradition of press freedom, from the tsars to the Bolsheviks, has created a society unaccustomed to fighting for its rights. Even during the interlude of transparency that accompanied Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost (openness) and the relative media freedoms under Boris Yeltsin, journalists were still conscious of being under the watchful eye of the Kremlin. Mr Panfilov nevertheless acknowledges that this era was imperative in laying the first foundations for freedom of expression, or in his own words, nurturing the "first shoots of freedom of speech" which have regrettably since been crushed by the "army boot of Putin".[ MORE TAG ]

According to Mr Panfilov, the perpetuation of this status quo is entrenched in the education system and so, students of journalism do not study journalism as one would expect, but rather Russian and foreign literature. This, he says, is part of the government agenda to "prepare an army of propagandists".

In theory, there are a number of laws which oblige Russia to safeguard freedom of expression and offer protection to journalists. Not only is Russia a member of the Council of Europe, but Article 29 of the Russian constitution stipulates the following: