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This is Inside Geneva.
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I'm your host, Imogen Folkes, and this is a production from SwissInfo, the international public media company of Switzerland.
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In today's program.
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I feel I'm monitoring the handbook for repression that the Russian government is using against its own civil society.
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And this handbook, unfortunately, has been copied by other leaders of democratic countries.
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Russia's last independent radio station has been taken off the air.
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Well, it's fake news.
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You know, it's just so it's so fake.
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That's why the media has so little credibility.
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This issue about the media has been there in the authoritarian rule book for a long time.
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Go after the media if you want to stay in power.
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What is happening now is that more and more countries we see an authoritarian trend coming generally into politics.
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Just be aware of this danger.
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Just don't let it happen.
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I'm watching now closely what's happening in the United States with closing of these programs.
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How is the society going to react?
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What will happen?
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Because this is how it starts.
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Hello and welcome again to Inside Geneva.
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And ask how it might relate to those of us living in what we hope are free democratic societies.
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How free are we really?
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Are press freedom the right to protest peacefully, or even the right to question your government being eroded in our own countries too?
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Should we be worried about creeping authoritarianism?
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And what are the warning signs?
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That's the discussion we're going to have today.
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We'll be hearing from UN experts and from writers and journalists who have first-hand experience of what repression of freedom of speech means.
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But first, to that latest UN report on Russia.
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Russia is now run through a state-sponsored system of fear and punishment, where dissent is erased and civic space dismantled.
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Mariana Katsarova, the UN special rapporteur on Russia, is the first UN expert ever appointed to investigate a permanent member of the UN Security Council.
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Her latest report was presented to the Human Rights Council's autumn session.
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It documents a repression so stifling that virtually all freedom of expression is silenced.
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And still, the remnants of civil society and independent media are being persecuted, prosecuted, and imprisoned.
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Immediately after presenting her report to UN member states, I caught up with Mariana Katsarova to hear more about her findings.
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So there is a strategic effort to distort historical truth about the past, particularly when this past was about dissidents and resistance to the Stalinist repression or the crimes that were happening.
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What does it mean for a society?
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I mean, this war has been going on more than three years.
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What does it mean for a society when it's a culture, its memories in a way, are being stamped on in this way?
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I think what it means for the society at the moment, the Russian authorities are using education to also destroy the outlook of the young to history, but also to the future and to the presence.
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There are these special lessons that they have for children, conversations about the important, lessons about the important.
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And the important is propaganda about Ukraine not being a state or the Ukrainians not being a separate country.
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At the same time, it's done in a way that, or on the background of distortion of historical truth about what Stalin did with all these dissidents and political prisoners, the millions that perished in gulags.
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And then the whole indoctrination of children about the war that is going on, trying to justify that it stems from the collective West being against Russia and Russians, and also that there are enemies of the motherland that need to be destroyed, put in prison, stopped.
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And these enemies are the human rights uh defenders, journalists, writers, uh humanitarians.
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But to hammer home the report's findings and to remind UN member states that there are still Russian voices trying to speak out.
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Ms.
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Katsarova brought Russian writers and journalists to Geneva.
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Some who still live in Russia gently refused interviews, fearing for their safety once they return.
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Russia's foreign agent law.
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No, it's not about spies and espionage.
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These days, it's Russian journalists that are in the hot seat.
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Others, like writer Boris Akunin, now live in the United Kingdom.
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He was recently designated a foreign agent by Moscow and sentenced in absentia to 14 years in prison for criticizing Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
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Load full transcript
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So a foreign agent is anybody they do not approve of.
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It is not decided by a court of justice or something, just some government institutions which says that you're a foreign agent, which means you cannot write, you cannot publish, you cannot teach, you are branded.
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We've got a lot of debate about free speech in the so-called West right now.
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How do you perceive that debate?
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Well, I think that the West these days is in deep crisis.
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Democracy, traditional democracy, is in crisis.
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Reasonable and grown-up people have become a minority.
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I believe that political elites and traditional parties are all in total crisis.
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I think that we fail to understand that the tide has changed, that the world has changed, that the political system created by the fall of the Berlin War, it's done, it's over.
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We are entering a totally new world where everything will be different.
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I'm very much worried about what's going to happen in the UK, in France, in the United States, it has already happened.
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You mean moving from democracy to authoritarianism?
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Moving from moving from common sense to craziness on both sides.
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It can be leftist extremism, quite infantile.
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It can be right-wing extremists, which is even more dangerous.
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And there is a very tiny space in between.
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So what we are in need of, I think a total reshaping of liberalism.
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We need not a childish liberalism, we need a grown-up liberalism which brings us to freedom of speech.
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We need to be responsible, we need to measure what we say, not because we are afraid of being canceled or censorship, but because we are grown-ups.
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If we say something publicly, we must understand the consequences.
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Another big issue of Western democracy is inability to communicate with people who are less educated than yourself.
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This snobbery, this inability to compete with Trump, who knows how to speak with people.
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He can find the words, he can find the reasons, he can find the levers.
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Why cannot we do that?
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Our ideas are better.
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Well, I mean, anybody can tell lies.
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You don't have to lie, but I know that we in Russia we lost because we were too snobbish.
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There was a famous Russian saying which I absolutely hate, belonging to a famous Russian poet.
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It says, if I need to explain this, then you're not worth explaining it to.
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That's how it sounds.
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That's how we mostly talk to ourselves, to people who think like ourselves.
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Well, we should have talked to people who do not think ourselves, who are different.
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And the same thing is happening in the West, totally.
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From common sense to craziness, not an especially hopeful analysis from Boris Akunin.
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Also in Geneva was Belorusian writer Svetlana Alekseyvich, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015, and author of Second Hand Time and The Unwomanly Face of War.
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Also now in exile from her own country and speaking through her tireless interpreter Elena, she shared Boris Okunin's concerns about the direction many current political leaders are taking.
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There seem seems to be a kind of lack of awareness in the world about what's really happening today.
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The same as 20 years ago we were thinking, well, you know, let it develop this democracy.
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Okay, it's weak, but it will slowly grow.
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And we were thinking, well, nothing bad is really happening around us.
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Let it do it its own, let it go its own way.
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And yet nobody is really taking it serious enough to work with young people, with the emerging generations, with people in general, to reflect upon what was happening to us, what is actually going on around us.
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And now we find our situation, ourselves in a situation when fascism is all around us.
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We are sitting here with fascism surrounding us.
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I think there is still this lack of understanding in Europe about what is actually taking place in Russia.
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They were saying to themselves, what not surely not fascism.
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We haven't developed the criteria to assess this new life we are living in.
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The White House has given Harvard an ultimatum to ditch diversity programs and muzzle campus activism or lose billions in federal funding.
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Are we in denial about Russia or about the new and repressive direction the world may be taking?
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In fact, the panel discussions Mariana Katsarova organized to allow writers like Akunin and Alexeyevich to share their views were completely full, standing room only, and there was testimony from journalists with first-hand experience of the risks of trying to report objectively from a repressive regime.
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After my arrest and detention in Russia, more than
nine months in prison.
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She has dual nationality, Russian and American.
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Charged with failing to register as a foreign agent, she spent months in jail before being freed in last year's historic prisoner swap.
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Now she asks people to remember the many journalists, lawyers, and human rights defenders who remain imprisoned in Russia.
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There are somebody's husbands and wives and their family members and they are real people who suffered and risked everything for their reporting just for us and other people to know what's happening in Russia.
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How do you see the freedom of journalists to report objectively on a wider scale?
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Obviously, this report is focused on Russia, but the climate, to me anyway, feels not ideal in other places too.
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Well, things are changing.
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I heard today from several people, and not only journalists, that freedom of speech and democracy are not for granted.
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This is something that has to be developed.
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This is something that has to be taken care of.
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And uh probably we we missed an opportunity of taking care of and cherishing democracy and freedom of speech some time ago.
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But it's never late to start now.
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It's never late to acknowledge how precious it is, how precious democracy, how precious freedom is.
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Interviewing these writers and journalists now exiled from their home countries because they tried to report, write, and express themselves freely, I was struck by their warnings to us to be alert for the signs of authoritarianism, of the repression of freedom of speech.
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The American TV network ABC has taken the late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel off-air indefinitely.
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When a late-night host is on network television, there is a licensing.
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If they're getting a license, I would think maybe their license should be taken away.
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The Russia Report was published the same week that in the United States, the late-night chat show host Jimmy Kimmel was taken off air.
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The significance was not lost on Irene Khan, the UN special rapporteur on freedom of expression, who points out that other governments have been adopting Russia's tactics for quite some time.
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I am concerned about shrinking freedom of expression, and it goes back even beyond uh what has happened in Russia since the invasion of uh Ukraine.
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My first mission in this current position as this special rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression was to Hungary.
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And in Hungary, I discovered how the Orban government has captured the media.
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And they started.
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The first legislation that was ever introduced by that government was in 2010, and it was the Media Act.
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So it was quite clear that if you want to take over institutions in a country, if you want to entrench your authority uh in an authoritarian way, you start with independent media.
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You undermine them, you control them, and you know in in uh Hungary it is also, it's it's all uh manipulated through media ownership, where basically there is no independent, very little independent media that exists offline, whether in print or uh broadcast or radio.
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So I think this issue about the media has been there in the authoritarian rule book for a long time.
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Go after the media if you want to stay in power.
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What is happening now is that actually uh more and more and more countries, we see an authoritarian trend coming generally into politics.
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And of course, each of them are then looking to uh how to control the media.
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Russia has been incredibly uh complete in the way in which they have captured or removed all independent media.
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Uh, when they introduced the legislation, you know, against uh speaking about uh the invasion of uh Ukraine as invasion uh introduced a number of legislation way back in 2022.
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At that point, I called it an information blackout.
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And since then, of course, we know that it has only become deeper, and now uh independent media is outside across the border.
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Can I ask you then?
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Because sometimes I sense a certain complacency in what we often loosely term Western democracies, that they say, oh well, but that's Russia, it's not happening here.
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Are there signs that it is?
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And if if there are, what are they for you?
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I think there are worrying signs.
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I would say uh if you look at media ownership in Western democracies, for a long time that has been an issue that no one's talked about.
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The European Union did not require any transparency with regard to media ownership until the Media Freedom Act came in.
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So, you know, and and what we have what we saw were media barons.
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And the media barons, of course, reduce pluralism and diversity of media.
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That has been a problem, I think, in Western democracy for a long time.
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What we see alongside that now
happening are other ways of trying to gag media.
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We see an increase in slaps, these are strategic legal actions that are brought against uh journalists.
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We see that increasingly now in the US, where the president of the United States sues media outlets for defamation.
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And we see settlements taking place between the president of the United States and a media outlet for millions.
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Do you think those big media outlets in the United States rolled over too quickly?
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Because it's what that's what a lot of my journalist colleagues say.
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Well, it's uh not for me to sort of judge why they're doing it, but let's not forget that media outlets are commercial outlets, yet the job they do is a public interest job.
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So there is this sort of tension in these organizations where, for commercial purposes, the owners or or the top uh echelon of the media outlets uh want to settle.
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Whereas the real job, which is the public interest job of providing truth to the population to uh have a free debate on many issues, that is kind of forgotten.
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So that there is a tension there, and we see that tension working out in this political environment where the authoritarian trends are emerging across institutional capture, uh restriction on not just on freedom of uh the media, but on academic freedom, for example, or artistic freedom across the spectrum of freedom of expression.
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We took the freedom of speech away because that's been through the courts, and we will absolutely target you, go after you if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.
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And Mariana Katsarova agrees, we are witnessing repression of freedom of expression on a much wider scale than many of us could have imagined even a year ago.
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These tactics are not unique to the Kremlin, she warns, and we shouldn't be complacent.
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Well, what's happening in in um Russia and my role, I feel I'm monitoring the handbook for repression that the Russian government um is using against its own civil society, journalism, free speech.
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And this handbook, unfortunately, what we see in the world, has been copied by other leaders of other countries, democratic countries, um, which are starting to experience a clampdown on freedom of expression, of closing television stations and shows and newspapers.
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So I think it's a warning.
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I mean, the law on foreign agent, for example, which Russia uses against its civil society and cultural figures.
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Now, even in my country, Bulgaria, they're discussing to adopt such a law.
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Or, you know, it it happens in other countries as well.
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I mean, this handbook of repression or uh clamp down on freedom of expression is now um reaching uh countries and leaders of countries which uh for so long have been democratic.
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I mean, yes, it's within Europe, also the United States at the moment, and this is the warning from Russia.
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So we shouldn't really abandon the fight for human rights, the support for the civil society there.
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Because it could happen to any of us in any country.
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You say that you feel that looking at Russia, it's a it's a manual for how to repress free speech, and you're expressed concern that other countries are reading bits of that manual and thinking, oh yeah, I'll do that.
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What are the key warning signs that in a democracy we should watch out for and how can we stand up for free speech?
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Yes, when the truth becomes um a political commodity, when uh journalists are being um sacked or silenced or programs are being closed only because um a leader or um governments don't like the sound of truth or speaking truth to the power.
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Yeah?
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If that's not what journalism is about, and this is challenged, then this is the first sign.
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But it's also um not covering, even not allowing the news about events to be covered in its entirety, so the truth to be told.
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That's a warning sign.
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That's the first sign.
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And I think uh so many populists are coming to power, populist parties are coming to power in different countries, we see it in Europe, for example, who are preaching completely everything against the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
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All the talks against uh refugees and asylum seekers and migrants and minorities, you know, LGBT, uh indigenous people, national minorities, the same as in Russia.
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The crackdown on LGBT persons, activists, the crackdown on indigenous people, national minorities, being pronounced extremist organizations, extremist people, and then being criminalized and imprisoned for being extremist.
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These are the signs, this hate speech starts now to be heard in our parliaments.
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It echoes the rhetoric of the Russian authorities.
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But then the Russian authorities are acting on this.
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I hope that we won't see this happening in our countries.
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And that's a hope shared by the writers and journalists I talk to, starting with Svetlana Alexeyevit, they too all warned against complacency and urged us not to stay silent in the face of
attacks on freedoms many of us, so used to them perhaps, may take for granted.
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There is a famous saying that the worst things are happening in the world when good people are keeping silent.
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So the good people in Russia, the good people in Belarus are keeping silent.
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Whereas the evil people in both countries are doing what we see in front of our eyes.
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So I don't think we should sing the odes to silence.
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I don't think it's right.
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Because we have, through our silence, we have lost our country in Belarus by being silent.
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Those people who are keeping silent, they should really do something.
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Just don't let it happen.
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So I'm watching now closely what's happening in in the United States with closing of these programs.
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How is the society going to react?
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What will happen?
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Because this is how it starts.
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You know, it's been more than a year since I got released from prison.
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Every morning I open my eyes.
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I'm so thankful.
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Like everyone involved who brought me back to my family for my children.
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This is exactly it.
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I know democracy and press freedom sounds very vague for people who uh live ordinary lives, right?
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As you said, okay, this conflict is happening there, why would I care?
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But uh actually, when it comes to you to your door and ring the bell, it's too late.
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Well, that's why, at least to be curious what's happening in different parts of the world, that's our duty as citizens of the free world.
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And um act small steps.
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And those powerful testimonies from Svetlana Alexeyvich, Boris Akunin, and Alsu Kurmasheva bring us to the end of this edition of Inside Geneva.
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We hope you enjoyed what they had to say, and perhaps you're motivated by their encouragement not to stay silent, to be aware, and to take steps, even small ones, to protect our precious freedom of expression.
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Coming up in future episodes of Inside Geneva, we'll continue the theme of freedom of expression by talking to journalists about the challenges and pressures around reporting on the conflict between Israel and Gaza.
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What Israel is doing, on the one hand, it has blocked access to international media, and on the other hand, it claims that local journalists who very often are working for international outlets are either Hamas associated with Hamas and it's not telling the truth, but Israel can't have it both ways.
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All Israel has to do is to allow international media in and let international media see what is actually happening.
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And we'll be asking whether the United Nations, now 80 years old, can survive without the United States.
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A reminder inside Geneva comes out every other Tuesday.
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In the meantime, you can catch up on previous episodes wherever you get your podcasts.
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Find out what the laws on genocide really say, or how the International Red Cross unites prisoners of war with their families, and the impact on women and girls of the cuts to humanitarian funding.
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Don't forget to subscribe to us and review us.
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We're always keen to hear your views.
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I'm Imogen Folks.