OBSTACLES TO FREE SPEECH AND THE SAFETY OF JOURNALISTS Friday 3 May 2013 Speakers Bios Professor Jackie Harrison is Professor of Public Communication and Chair of the Centre for Freedom of the Media (CFOM) at the University of Sheffield. She has written three single authored books; is the joint author of three and a co-editor of a further two books and numerous papers and chapters. A consistent theme of her work is the civil role and power of news and she is currently completing a book entitled The Civil Power of the News which examines the way that the news frames our invariant civil concerns and influences public sentiment in terms of the boundaries we place and maintain around what we regard as the civil sphere. She is part of a team undertaking work on different news media legal and policy regimes; the failures and abuses of news media freedom and violence against the news media and news journalists. Her most recent publications include papers on the relationship between news, religion and politics, news and freedom of expression and the early history of European public communication policy and its civil narrative. She is currently working on a research project that will look at how the notion of the public has been used by different organisations, groups, agencies and advocacy groups both during and since the Leveson inquiry and contrasting that with what the public actually think about news journalism reforms. Professor Bill Bowring is Professor of Law at Birkbeck College, University of London where he teaches Human Rights, Public International Law and Minority Rights. He previously taught at the University of East London, Essex University, the University of North London, and London Metropolitan University. He is also a practising barrister specialising in human rights, representing applicants against Russia, Georgia and Latvia, at the European 1
Court of Human Rights, and is founder and Chair of the International Steering Committee of the European Human Rights Advocacy Centre (EHRAC). He has more than 90 publications, including The Degradation of the International Legal Order? The Rehabilitation of Law and the Possibility of Politics (Routledge, 2008). His Law Rights and Ideology in Russia: Landmarks in the Destiny of a Great Power was published in April 2013, also from Routledge. He advises the Council of Europe, EU, OSCE and UN on human rights and minority rights. He was a founding member of the Bar Human Rights Committee, and is currently a member of its Executive Committee. He is also a Trustee of the Redress Trust (Reparation for Torture Survivors), is International Secretary of the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers, and President of the European Association of Lawyers for Democracy and Human Rights (ELDH). He has been working regularly in Russia since 1983, and speaks Russian. Geoffrey Robertson QC is founder and head of Doughty Street Chambers, the UK's largest human rights practice. He has argued many landmark media law cases including Goodwin v UK (which established the rights of journalists in Europe to protect their sources), and Jameel v Wall Street Journal (which secured a pubic interest defence to libel actions) As President of the UN War Crimes Court in Sierra Leone, he handed down what remains the leading judgment on the testamentary privileges for war correspondents and their sources. As long-time counsel for the Wall Street Journal he has represented its staff in many commonwealth courtrooms and he acted for the journalist Paul Klebnikov, later assassinated in Moscow, in the defamation brought against him by Boris Beresovsky. At the Old Bailey he appeared for "Oz", "Gay News" and for the National Theatre when it was prosecuted by Mary Whitehouse for staging The Romans in Britain. In other free speech cases he has acted for client s ranging from Salman Rushdie and Julian Assange, to Mike Tyson and the Sex Pistols. His books include Robertson & Nicol on Media Law; People against the Press; and Crimes Against Humanity - the Struggle for Global Justice. Last week his report on media law and regulation, commissioned by the government of Mauritius, was published, which rejected Leveson in favour of a statutory Ombudsperson system. 2
Professor Ivor Gaber is Professor of Political Journalism at City University London and Research Professor in Media and Politics at the University of Bedfordshire. He is also a broadcaster, researcher and consultant. As an independent producer he makes programmes for Radio 4 and the World Service. His main field of academic expertise is the field of political communications. He has co-authored three books and numerous articles on this topic, and has served as a media consultant to a variety of organisations, governments and international bodies including UK Government departments, the European Union, the Council of Europe and UNESCO (the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation). His journalistic career has included senior editorial positions at the BBC, ITN, Channel Four and Sky News. He has recently completed consultancies in Uganda and China. He represents the UK on the Inter-Governmental Council of UNESCO s International Programme for Developing Communication (IPDC) and he is an Independent Editorial Adviser to the BBC Trust. He was Deputy Chair of the Communications Section of the UK UNESCO National Commission and has been on the organising committee for World Press Freedom Day in the UK for many years. Recent foreign media development assignments include Nigeria in 2011 where he ran a training programme for over 100 political journalists and was editor of the Nigerian Election News Report, an independent election news agency, based on mobile phone technology and the internet; in Uganda he helped set up the country's first national news agency for radio stations and in China he worked with Chinese Government media officials to better understand Western concepts of freedom of expression and investigative journalism. Dr. Carmen Draghici is a Senior Lecturer in Law, and the Deputy Director and Admissions Tutor of City Law School s LLB programme. She joined City in 2009, after a one-year Leverhulme Visiting Post-doctoral Research Fellowship at the Centre on Human Rights in Conflict (University of East London) in 2008. In 2007 she was awarded a PhD degree by the University of Rome La Sapienza for a thesis on the international and regional protection of family rights. At 3
City Carmen teaches Family and Child Law and Human Rights Law at undergraduate/ graduate entry level, European Union Law tutorials on the Graduate Diploma in Law, and International Dispute Settlement on the LLM in Public International Law. She also acts as Visiting Professor in Public International Law at the Open University of Catalonia (Barcelona, Spain). Carmen s main research interests concern the practice of the European Court of Human Rights, domestic, EU and UN counter-terrorism regimes, and the responsibility of States and international organisations for breaches of human rights and humanitarian law. She has authored several scholarly articles and chapters published in UK, US and European journals and edited collections. Her current projects include developments in the international guarantees for the protection of the family life of cohabitees, same-sex couples and transgender persons, on which she has recently carried out work as a Visiting Research Scholar at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University (Boston, US). Carmen joined the Centre for Family and Child Law Reform in 2010; her main contribution to drafting responses to Law Commission consultations regarded the Domestic Violence Disclosure Scheme. Dr. Damian Carney is a Principal Lecturer at the University of Portsmouth whose main areas of research include Media Law and Ethics. He has been a judge at the Monroe E. Price International Media Law Moot since 2010. He has written extensively on the issue of protection of journalists' confidential, and is currently writing a monograph for Routledge on the topic, which adopts comparative, theoretical and critical approaches to the issue. He has also written extensively on the Leveson Inquiry and wrote the first academic article on the issue of phonehacking by journalists. He has a bid pending with the British Academy which looks at the use of newspaper ombudsmen in the United Kingdom. Merris Amos is a Senior Lecturer in Law at Queen Mary, University of London where she teaches UK Human Rights Law and European Human Rights Law. 4
Prior to this she was a Lecturer in Law at the University of Essex and Deputy Director of the Human Rights Centre. Her research primarily concerns the protection of human rights at the national level, in particular the Human Rights Act 1998. She has published a book on this subject, Human Rights Law (Oxford: Hart, 2006) and with Harrison and Woods, edited Freedom of Expression and the Media (Leiden: Brill, 2012). She is also the Editor of Human Rights Law Reports UK Cases. She has written a number of chapters and articles concerning human rights law including: The impact of the Human Rights Act on the UK s performance before the European Court of Human Rights [2007] Public Law 655; Problems with the Human Rights Act and how to remedy them: is a bill of rights the answer? (2009) 72 Modern Law Review 883-908; What has the Human Rights Act done for the media? in M. Amos, J. Harrison and L. Woods (Eds.) Freedom of Expression and the Media: (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 2012); The dialogue between United Kingdom courts and the European Court of Human Rights [2012] International and Comparative Law Quarterly 557-584; and Transplanting human rights norms: the case of the United Kingdom s Human Rights Act [2013] Human Rights Quarterly, forthcoming. She is currently writing the second edition of her book Human Rights Law. Nathalie Losekoot leads ARTICLE 19 s work on Europe and Central Asia, and joined the organisation in 2009. For ARTICLE 19 she wrote the country report No justice for journalists in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia (2011). She has over 15 years experience in working with/in countries of the former Soviet Union on various human rights issues, combined with international development work. She holds an MA in Russian Studies and holds a degree with the European Postgraduate Course in Environmental Management. From 1999 to 2005 she worked at the International Secretariat of Amnesty International in London, campaigning on a variety of human issues in the Central and Eastern European region. This included work on Human Rights Defenders in Belarus and the rights of people with disabilities in Bulgaria. In August 2005 she moved to Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, to volunteer for a local charity, and later started working as Associate Director for the Eurasia Foundation of Central Asia (EFCA) in Kyrgyzstan. 5