 Great, we have a lot of wonderful group and not a lot of time, so we'll start a couple of minutes early. Welcome. I'm Edward Feldmanthal. I'm the editor-in-chief of Time and we have a distinguished panel here to talk about one of the central issues of our time in this moment of strife and transition in the world, freedom of the press, restrictions on it, the crisis of truth and misinformation around the world. I want to introduce our panelists and then we'll watch a very short video clip and begin our discussions. Starting at the end, Patrick Chapeat. If you're a lover of political cartoons, you have surely seen his name in the corner of many of your favorites. He is an editorial cartoonist now for the Boston Globe, Der Spiegel, Le Canard on Shen, formerly with the Times and the International Herald Tribune for a couple of decades and also runs an important organization in the world of press freedom. He's the president of Freedom Cartoonist Foundation in Geneva. We have next to Patrick Sasha Valkulina, who is a senior editor at Euronews from Ukraine and found herself in Ukraine at the outbreak of the war in February and will tell us about that experience. We have Christophe Delois, the secretary general of Reporters Without Borders, began his career as an investigative reporter and has spent the last decade running Reporters Without Borders and protecting all of our right to do what he began doing earlier in his career. He's and his organization are at the forefront of efforts to defend the future of journalism. Ken Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, one of the great human rights organizations in the world operating in over 90 countries on the ground in war zones around the world, including Ukraine. And finally, Dr. Agnes Kalamal, the secretary general of Amnesty International, another extraordinary human rights organization. She leads it, has been a prominent figure in the human rights world for decades, former director of global freedom of expression at Columbia University in New York. So welcome to all of you. Thank you to everybody in the audience and watching for participating. As I said, I want to open with a short clip, 59 seconds, but I think we'll help set the stage. Someone all of us up here admire who has become a global icon in the press freedom struggle. A lot of the pleasures of my work in the last few years at time and our work, my colleagues' work, has been using our platform to highlight leaders across disciplines, including journalists who are leading this struggle that we are discussing today. And so I want you to watch a short video about the amazing Maria Ressa and the warning and challenge she issued when we made her a person of the year in 2018. The Philippines is moving towards authoritarian rule. Social media has been weaponized and the first targets are the journalists. Rappler, an online news site known to be critical of the government, had its license revoked. You know, no one sets out to say, I'm going to violate the Constitution. It's the series of small decisions that in the end bends and breaks the rule of law. When Trump says there will be no new punishment against Saudi Arabia over the killing of US based journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The Philippines is a cautionary tale for the United States. When you have a community of nations and a journalist gets murdered and dismembered, who is the moral leader? This is one of those times that's going to determine who you are, right? What are you going to stand for? What is the line that you won't cross? So Maria of course went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize along with Dmitry Murotov, amazing Russian journalist last year. And I think her question, what are we all going to do is the ultimate question we want to discuss here. We're going to spend a little time laying out the problem and the challenge, but we want to talk about response. And I asked Kristoff to kick us off, if you would, because reporters without borders publishes a very important index of press freedom every year. And Kristoff, if you could just give us top line, where are we? What are the key trends you're seeing and that the index is showing us? If you would have a look at the world press freedom map, you would see that every year it's darker. Because journalism is under attack and there are now different fronts. Journalists themselves are attacked. Their rights are violated. They are sometimes killed. In the video we saw Jamal Hashoggi, but more recently famous Al Jazeera journalist was killed in Palestine. And we see the level of impunity. Israel said they would not investigate further. We need an international investigation. They're in jail. Right now there are more than 400 journalists in jail in the world. But there are also invisible prisons, invisible bullets. Journalism itself, beyond journalists, is under attack. Press freedom predators can kill journalists. The way digital platforms and social networks work does kill journalism. For the first time in the history of democracies there is an unprecedented distortion of competition. There is now in the digital ecosystem a competitive advantage for remorse, hate speech, extremism, for the people who see plots everywhere, and the journalism itself is weakened. So as an organization that defends journalism, we have to defend journalists. Very recently we did work, of course, a lot on Ukraine and had to create a press freedom center to protect journalists, to deliver bulletproof jackets, helmets, trainings for the journalists, because the war came to them one night they became war reporters. But we also have to work on the ecosystem itself to secure a future for the social function, which is a social function of journalism, which is to be trusted at parties for the public debate. You talk about the overall picture getting darker. In addition, the trend line with some Western democracies, which had been higher on the list, Germany and the US, I think have moved down a bit. What's happening outside some of the areas that have been issues for years? The US had a decline in the world press freedom index in the past years, not this year. You could imagine why, no need to describe. What we see is that there is an erosion of some democratic models, and for instance in Europe, in different countries. Journalists were killed. Journalists were killed in the US too, in the capital Gazette. So what we see is that when you are an investigative reporter, you can be retargeted even in peacetime. The majority of journalists were killed, are killed in countries that are supposed to be at peace. Why? Because in the past, if you were a journalist, you were now with a disintermediation of the public space. As a power, are you a political power, a private power, a religious power, you can directly send contents to your audience. So journalists are considered as really people who just disturb your capacity to communicate about yourself. And that's why they're really deliberately targeted. Agnes, Patrick's talked about the threats to life and the state-generated restrictions on press freedom. You and I were talking a little bit earlier this morning about the use of the law, the weaponization of the law in other ways to restrict press freedom. Could you speak to that threat, please? Marie-Yarissa that introduced that panel is a typical example of a government using every single legal mechanisms to silence a journalist, to instill and create fear within the journalistic community. I don't know. I think she has more than 60 lawsuits against her at the moment in the Philippines. At Amnesty International, we documented in 2021 67 countries that have adopted new laws that are meant to curtail freedom of expression or freedom of assembly. We have documented a range of measures taken against journalists. Those laws are put in practice. Two weeks ago, or about two weeks ago, a Greek journalist was on trial for disclosing information and found guilty. The use of slap, you know, those legal, those laws that are really meant to either make it impossible for people to continue their investigation because of the legal cost or to create fear within the media outlet, the use of slap is certainly not decreasing but rather increasing even though there are responses to that. So the laws are being weaponized around the world in order to silence freedom of the press. And it is something that must be at the forefront of our thinking because free and independent information is really a major, is at the heart of the global system right now that is being pulled apart, re-established, disrupted and so on and so forth. And if we do not maintain that space for a free and independent media, the construction of this new world order is going to be extremely biased, one-sided and detrimental to us all. Yes, I think that's an important point and that we can't begin to collaborate around the world on our massive collective problems if we can't establish what the facts are. And that I think is a good segue, Ken and Kristoff touched on social media but if you could speak a little about the role of social media in this crisis, pro and con and how you were looking at that challenge. All right, let me maybe as a prelude to that talk for a moment about the role of journalism within democracy because that is directly related to your question. That's why we're here. Yes. And, you know, if you read the Autocrat's handbook, which doesn't really exist but it may as well exist because they all read from the same playbook, it always begins with shutting down the independent media. And there's a reason for that because, you know, if a citizenry is going to hold a government to account, it needs, you know, Edward as you're suggesting, it needs to know what's going on, you know, and the average citizen can't do that. They just don't have the time. So you need, you know, a subset of society, the specialists who are called journalists, whose job it is to, you know, ferret out what's happening and as carefully as possible to convey that to the public so the public in an informed manner can say, this is how we want the government to act or not to act, which is why the Autocrats want to silence the journalists because they don't want that level of accountability. And if you want to sort of undermine the electoral system and maintain power, we start with the journalists. So that, you know, just as a caveat, the good news behind the decline that Christophe is describing is that journalists matter. You know, if journalism was irrelevant, they'd be going and writing and everybody would be ignoring them, you know, but that's not where it is. They are seen as absolutely essential to preventing the emergence of autocracy. And so yes, they are being targeted. And the public wants democracy, the journalists are out leading the way, they're being attacked. Now, social media has become a way for Autocrats and others to evade that kind of journalistic accountability. It used to be that, you know, to get information out, you would need to pass through an editor like you, Edward, you know, and you guys are not perfect, you know, there are, you know, editors at Fox News who somehow are letting Tucker Carlson talk about the replacement theory, you know, but, you know, nonetheless, it generally meant that, you know, there was some fact-checking, some effort to arrive at the truth, you know, some effort to kind of stay within the realm of accepted public discourse. And social media, you know, great as it is for allowing anybody to speak, great as it is for, you know, allowing kind of hidden corners of the world to be magnified, it has the downside of letting, you know, powerful institutions or governments speak directly to the people and evade efforts to present information responsibly of the sort that Edward, you would oversee. And so that's, you know, the danger of social media. These are, you know, powerful governments, they have a lot of money, they can set up, you know, many fake sites and trolls in the whole bit, and they can flood the information market with information that is completely unmediated. And that, you know, is the downside of social media today. Unmediated, and in the case of the United States with the infamous section 230, free of liability for spreading falsehoods and the kind that we would... Which I should say is also, you know, it's complicated because I actually think that social media should, you know, you don't want them, you know, being responsible for every single post because, you know, it would turn into just a massive censorship thing. But you do want some level of accountability with respect to the algorithms. And as Kristoff mentioned, you know, the algorithms today are, you know, are written to promote engagement because engagement is profitable. Engagement is more eyeballs. And what is engaging, you know, the provocative which could be, as Kristoff said, you know, rumors, you know, falsehoods, you know, hate speech, divisiveness. And so, you know, when we talk about social media, for me, I don't really focus so much on what should be taken down, you know, the overt censorship, but rather what is being promoted. And if algorithms are promoting information that, in essence, is false or divisive because it's profitable, there, I do think there is accountability that is quite warranted for these companies. Well, that's also good something for us to come back to when we talk about solutions and action. Patrick, jumping to you, you know, Ken talks about the Autocrat's playbook and first they come for the journalists within that category. Very often first they come for the satirists, right? Yeah, that's true. Yes. Even before the journalists, it's sometimes said that political cartoonists are the canary in the coal mine, alluding to those little birds that the miners would take down with them in the tunnels. And if toxic gas would collect, the canary would be the first to die, so that would send an alarm. So this metaphor is not to say that we are strange little birds, though we are, but it's true that very often political cartooning, or let's say political satire in all its forms, is a barometer of a free speech and a symptom. And when political cartoonists get attacked, it's very often something we should be paying attention to. Autocrats, it's true, have a very thin skin, you know, the macho of this world. They are actually in panic when they see cartoons, because they are very afraid of humor. They built their empires on fear and on lies, so they are just afraid of being exposed through satire and through cartoons. So the foundation we have in Geneva, the Freedom Parties Foundation, has been given an award every two years since 2012, and Ken Roth is on the jury, actually president of the jury this year, to cartoonists to salute not only their talent, but their courage and the circumstances in which they do their art. And that's really a prize not only for cartoonists, but to salute freedom of expression and freedom of the press. So this year, it's telling that our award went to, we had winners from Malaysia, from Kenya, from Egypt, from the Middle East. This year, we had two laureates, one from Hungary, at the heart of the European Union, and another one from Ukraine, Vladimir Kazanevsky. So you know him. And so that was a wonderful moment. And Maria Ressa and Mitya Muratov, the two Nobel Peace laureates, came to Geneva and gave a wonderful keynote and presented those awards. It was May 3 this year. But in 2018, I want to show a cartoon by someone called Muzakart. He was the winner of our award in 2018. And Muzakart was not, so he's a Turkish cartoonist, working for basically the only valid opposition newspaper in Turkish Umeriyet. And in 2018, he was not able to come to Geneva to collect his award for the good reason that he was in jail. He had been swept in the crackdown after the failed coup against Erdogan, with, I think, 13 journalists from Umeriyet, and sentenced to more than three years in jail, basically for doing what? For doing cartoons in Erdogan's turkey. I spent more than one year in jail. And this year, we wanted to invite him since he didn't have the chance to come to Geneva last time. And his family told me he's still barred from traveling four years after his jail time. So this tells us, again, cartoonists are being harassed, condemned, imprisoned, forced into exile, or fired. And this reminds us that political satire and editorial catering is very often an act of courage and very symbolic of what's happening in the rest of the media world. Thank you. I want to turn to Sasha with thanks to Ken for reminding us all that what you do and I do is important. And you played an important role in the conflict we're all mesmerized by with so much at stake. You're from Ukraine, and you found yourself covering the war at its beginnings. Would you tell us about that and what you experienced? Yeah, I am Ukrainian, but I'm normally, for the past 11 years, I'm based in France with the Euronews. I do travel a lot, but let's say I'm a business editor. So I normally cover economy, business, politics. I'm not a war correspondent. To help coverage, because Euronews broadcasts in 12 languages, we also have branded affiliates to help understand, I was on assignment in Kiev, let's say in the run up to, to help with the coverage or the back of all these Western warnings about the invasion that was coming. And I went to Kiev on the 13th of February. And as you said, found myself then in the early days of this war, I was in Kiev. I stayed in rather central part of Kiev to be able to move around and to do, to do my job. But these were the days when, as you remember, Kiev was the primary target. These were the days when the capital got surrounded. And for the first week of coverage, I had to, I'm fascinated by the courage and the expertise of war reporters, wherever they are. That could be Ukraine. There could be other countries, unfortunately, art war. What happened with Ukraine is, and here I want to really specify, Ukrainian journalists, because I had to turn into a war reporter overnight, but all of them had to do that. TV, print, digital, photographers, everybody who works in Ukrainian media overnight had to learn and had to become war correspondent. And these guys have done and have been doing ever since an amazing job. And it is so important, as you said, even practical things about being able to have proper gear, bulletproofs, helmets, these were all the issues that were discussed. You could see in those days in Kiev, you could see journalists running around without any gear, because just they couldn't have one. They couldn't find any. And this is not luxury. This is just essential thing that they have to have it. And of course, they have to be able to do their job. We said here that freedom of press and freedom of speech is now more important than ever. And we are always saying this, but I do get the feeling that today we're saying it is more important than ever. And then something will happen tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, and we're going to say now it's even more important than ever. It's always only getting more important. Hanya's jumping off of that and the threat to journalists on the ground in Ukraine and in conflict zones around the world. We've seen a lot of journalists lose their lives in Ukraine. What is your organization doing to monitor these threats? And I know you were personally involved in the Khashoggi investigation. He was also a person of the year we named Maria Wan. Could you speak to that? Sure. So of course, killing is the ultimate form of censorship. And journalists are targeted to send a message to the entire society. To send a message that they should not step over a certain line and cross a number of red flags. The killing of Jamal Khashoggi was probably one of the most horrendous and ultimately public killing. The stories have been told in many ways and in many forms. And I want to pay tribute here to journalists around the world, to the media, because thanks to their work, my investigation was a UN investigation and it mattered. But what journalists have done and the media has done for the last since 2018 to keep Jamal's killings on the agenda, that is what has made that killing so important. And I send a message to all the autocrats that if you're going to kill a journalist, be warned, be prepared, we are there, we're standing up. And that's, I think, an important lesson. They don't like scrutiny. They kill because they don't want to be scrutinized. So we need to scrutinize back. There are many ways of doing that. Some organizations are now ensuring that all the work of killed journalists and prison journalists is publicly available so that their words don't die and the focus of their work know that they are not going to go off of the agenda. So that's an important measure. Keeping the focus on those killings on the public arena, it's super important, super important. I can't say less than that. We must ensure that those who have been killed by autocrats or others, mafia and so on, that we keep their names alive, we keep their work alive, and we keep the focus of their investigation knowing that they are being and continuing to be scrutinized. And thirdly, you alluded to it. The international community has made itself powerless willingly in front of those killings, whether they are journalists, human rights defenders, anyone speaking up. There are a few mechanisms to tackle war crimes and it's great, genocide, crimes against humanity. This is the top of the massive human rights violations, but we're doing nothing to tackle the early warning to those crimes against humanity, which is when people start targeting human rights defenders and journalists. We need an international mechanism which will allow for those killings to be investigated effectively, impartially, and for an accountability mechanisms to be identified around the world. That is what's missing at the moment. I've advocated for such a mechanism since my investigation into Jamal Khashoggi because that was of my own initiative. There was nothing institutionally that prepared me for doing it. I just did it, but that's not acceptable. We as an international community must have such a mechanism in place, and it's not there at the moment, so we need to advocate for it. As we are talking about responses, I want to highlight the work of reporters without borders because the killing of Jamal Khashoggi in my view, because of all the legal dimension of it, including the fact that he was targeted into a sovereign country and so on, to me was an extraordinarily serious crime under international law, and one that required or that should require universal jurisdiction to be implemented. I called for that in my report. The killing of journalists should prompt universal jurisdiction. We should not use that tool only for crimes against humanity, even though, of course, it needs to be used for that. And I'm so grateful to reporters without borders. I'm not gonna tell the story, but I think you should tell it because that's a formidable tool. No, no, what we need, we have good resolutions of various UN bodies regarding the protection of journalists. The problem is that these are just resolutions and that are not implemented. So we need very concrete mechanisms to implement the existing international law on the protection of journalists. Very quickly, regarding Shirene Abu-Aqli, the Al-Jazeera journalist, we need an international independent investigation which should be initiated by the UN Secretary General. Clearly, we saw that Israel will not investigate, as they said it. The Palestinian authorities have transferred some elements to the ICC, but it will probably not be enough. But we need permanent systems so that really when cases happen, there can be political will. And for the moment, there are just statements. For instance, regarding Shirene Abu-Aqli, there were a lot of statements calling for an independent investigation, but what will follow? I'll make a guess, nothing. Unless there is enough pressure. Can your organizations also at the forefront of this, where can we push it to? Well, I mean, what we've been talking about here is how do you defend media freedom? And we do need to foremost look to democracies that should appreciate the importance of journalism to take that lead. And we're at a moment where it's just not quite clear where the democracies stand. And I say this really very much in the context of the Ukraine war and then the broader contest with China. But if you look at this right now, there's pressure being put on Hungary to allow a European Union boycott of Russian oil. And Orban, the Hungarian prime minister, is coming back and saying, well, only if you allow the European Union subsidies to come to Hungary that are supporting my autocracy and that have been cut off so far because of what are called rule of law violations but really have to do with his crushing of the media and his crushing of civil society. So Orban is saying, okay, you wanna stop Russia's invasion of Ukraine, let me continue crushing the journalists. Saudi Arabia, people went to them and said, would you pump more oil to make up for the lack of Russian oil and this spike in prices? And Mohammed bin Salman came back and said, well, only if you, one, start selling me offensive weapons so I can continue to bomb Yemeni civilians, but second, I want you to get rid of those pesky lawsuits against me in the United States for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. So far, Biden said no to that, but who knows where this stands? Or if you look at Duterte, who is responsible for these multiple lawsuits against Marina Brisa, he and his fellow autocrats from ASEAN were just invited to the White House to try to build this anti-China coalition, even though they represent the antithesis of freedom of the media. So I think there's a tendency to look at the contest with Russia and China as just a superpower competition when it really should be understood as a contest between autocracy and democracy which requires standing up for the values of democracy and foremost freedom of the media. Patrick, you mentioned Musakart and his case. Do you and your freedom organization also elevates these courageous, satirist cartoonists? Do you see in his case or in others what kind of response from the international bodies that could help in a case like that? In his, well, in the case of Musakart of other cartoonists working in non-functioning democracies, of course, it's a matter of, it's the same thing we're talking about, of what organizations, what states can put pressure. And in the case of Musakart, I know that Kofi Annan was the honorary chair of the Foundation for 10 years. And the last time we saw him before he passed away was 2018, came to Geneva, I visited the exhibition that we had every two years, and he told us, it's between you and me, he told us that he had actually written to Erdogan personally to plead for the cause of Musakart which I don't think helped a lot, but still he spent one year in jail instead of three. But we were at a point where we had no leverage, no point of pressure on countries like Turkey or I don't know about the Philippines, but a lot of them, they just don't respond to external pressure anymore. And so that's the tough point. But there we're talking about a classic which is a pressure by the state. What is interesting with cartoons, again, very symptomatic of what's going on in society is even in functioning democracies, we are faced with other kind of threats and we are kind of coming up with a temptation for censorship. Of course, I'm talking about what's going on. So in those democracies we don't have that much of a censorship problem with the state, but then we have temptation of censorship coming from civil society. And I'm talking, of course, of the new form of activism which pursues very good goals, new progressism, but which might be tempted by the suppression of contempt and call it cancel culture, for example, the suppression of contempt that they feel is offensive. So in this culture of offense and sensitivity we have a new challenge and that pose another question, how to respond to that. And for me the big question is today is how to reconcile the just causes and the good fights of these new activists with the notion, and maybe it takes education, but a lot of education, the notion that we, at the same time need to defend freedom of expression as a basic fundamental right on which their own activism is based. There's no activism without freedom of expression. Takes me back to something Maria said in that clip at the beginning, where do we draw the line? And I think, Patrick, if you don't mind, would you share your, you had 20 years at the Harold Tribune and at the Times and that ended because of a cartoon that you didn't do and that shouldn't have run, but how did that play out? Yeah, true. I lost my job over a cartoon I didn't do, which is interesting. No, it's true that the New York Times did not have a tradition of political cartoons. But I thought at some point that we had brought that that they got used to it because coming from the Harold Tribune, which had a good tradition and readers were very supportive of the opinion page with the political cartoon, which is a staple of a lot of American newspapers. That was brought into the New York Times through my, the fact that I was contributing to the Harold Tribune and it went on for a while. For a few years, we were on the social media platform translated in Chinese and Spanish, which is interesting thinking about political cartoons. There is no political cartoonist in China, if you think about it. And so one cartoon that was syndicated, taken out of syndication from a Portuguese cartoonist about Trump and Netanyahu. And the sad thing is if you Google New York Times cartoon, you will not see my work of 20 years. You will see that cartoon, I'm sure, because that triggered such a big controversy. It was denounced as anti-Semitic. And what the New York Times did, and that's interesting to the question I was posing, how do we respond? They were faced with one of those massive, massive storms, you know, social media, Breitbart, Fox News. They were really faced with a big communication problem and they responded with damage control and more damage control. Where I think that would have been a chance for a media to exactly put some context, explain what's going on, who did that cartoon? What does it mean? Why would it be anti-Semitic? Is it? There's a whole, that was a chance to actually have a real debate on freedom of expression and problematic content. But what they did was apologize and after a few days they decided to stop publishing political cartoons altogether, which, if you want, is a clear and good solution because you have a problem with the content, just get rid of all that content. Well, they still have opinions even though some of them didn't go well. But I think what is sad about that story is it's emblematic of maybe the most powerful newspaper in the world sending a signal all over the world because all the media in Central America, South America, Asia look at the New York Times as a model of freedom of expression. So they were kind of introducing self-censorship, preventive self-censorship in order not to have problems and issues with that type of content. And I think every time you close, every time you fire a political cartoonist, you close a space for freedom. Sasha, I wanna ask you a question and then we'll have a few minutes, hopefully for a question and two from the audience as well. But take us into the newsroom. Newsrooms have personalities and go through phases and Kristoff talked about the overall trends around a press, a freedom at the outset. What is your newsroom feel like right now? We're in this moment of incredible stress on the business model, censorship, threats to journalistic and press freedom. How's this all playing out inside your newsroom? Well, you see, our newsroom is slightly special. Let me put it this way because we have more than 30 nationalities in the same newsroom working all together at the same time. And this gives you this great variety and as well, absolutely great context when it comes to news. The conversations in the newsroom, when you have people with different backgrounds, different specialties, I mean, I'm normally doing economy, right? But now the situation has changed. But I believe also the more diversities, the better comes the result. Same way as I am mostly doing good old TV news. But for example, a couple of years ago, we did create for TV, talking about social media and how to cope with this situation. We created a social media newsroom that then goes on TV. This is the team of specialized journalists in social media, except we turned that into TV as well. So having this, having the different nationalities, different backgrounds and also specializing into somebody goes into team working for social media, on social media, on all the verifying, all the debunking, everything, but also being integrated into TV in our case, because we are doing TV, this diversity and this full picture, this is what gives you more strength and capability to deal with some of the challenges. Excellent. Questions from, if you would just stand, I think somebody's gonna bring you a mic. Yes, here. Thank you. My name is Linda Walker-Francois-Reed, and I would like to say that all of us should congratulate every single one of you here for the hard work and the dangerous work that you're doing. But I want to pinpoint Ken, because I think if I'm understanding correctly, Ken is going to be retiring soon, and we have to all congratulate him, but I also have a question for Ken, and I think Ken has put Human Rights Watch on the map, and one of the reasons he's been able to do that is because he's been able to find the funding. I support the International Pen Club, I don't know if everyone knows the International Pen Club, a girlfriend of mine was the first woman in the 100-year history of the pen to be president, and I've been trying to help them find funding, and it's very difficult, and one of the reasons is because a lot of people say, well, how can I support an organization that's going to be controversial? So Ken, my question to you is, you've done a fantastic job and I congratulate you, but give us the secret. Well, first I should say, well, thank you for the kind words. I'm going to be leaving Human Rights Watch at the end of August. I'm not going to be retiring, I guarantee that. I will find many ways to stay involved. But no, I think your question is, I've built Human Rights Watch over the years. It was a $6 million organization when I took it over. It's a $95 million organization today. We have a staff of 550, 88 nationalities around the world. We're working in 100 countries. So, and what I've found is that, if you go to somebody and say, are you for human rights? They say, yes, here's a 100-year-old check. But I say, well, actually I'd like more than that. You have to show that they're going to make a difference. And you have to give them an opportunity to have an impact in the world. And that's the key. And I think all of us find ways to do that, but it's all about finding ways to push governments, to force the autocrat to release the journalist or to allow more media space. And once you show that it's not just standing for something, but it's actually moving governments to respect rights, then people make serious contributions. Thank you. Yes, over here. Two over here, yeah. Thank you very much. Khalid Jani from Vision 3. Actually, I come from part of the world where we are much better than that. It says freedom of the press. We are freedom of the official press. And that said, it is autocratic world. I'd like to come to Ken's point about autocrats. Of course, if you request something from autocrats, they will say we want one, two, three, not to do that. My problem is where the Western democracies keep quiet about these autocracies, called them allies. And what happens is, in return, for then autocrat, for doing something, who says, OK, now buy more arms for me, I'll keep my eyes shut, give my son a law, and my secretary of treasury a few billion dollars on their funds, I'll keep my eyes shut. So I think it's a problem that is reversed. And we don't talk about the hypocrisy from the reverse, we just talk from one side. So that is a problem where autocrats do what they do because the West keeps them doing it. You're completely right. And the hypocrisy of the Western stands for human rights broadly, including media freedom. The inconsistency is a real problem. And the epicenter of that hypocrisy is the Middle East. And if you look at Egypt, which today under CC is the most repressive government in Egypt's modern history, the journalists have just been shut down. But because Egypt is a major purchaser of arms, because it pretends that it fights terrorism, even though it promotes terrorism, because they help to stop migration, the huge international aid goes to them, and they reciprocate by buying arms. Saudi Arabia, it's the same thing. And frankly, Israel is the same thing. Christophe was talking about that. There is a huge reluctance to press Israel, where of course they have freedom of the media within Israel proper. But when you get into the occupied territories, it's a totally different story. And there's a real reluctance to put serious pressure on Israel. So I think that to be an effective upholder of media freedom and human rights more broadly, we need to push the self-styled major defenders to be more consistent or the success, the effectiveness of their defense is undermined. One more over two. Lots of questions. Without whistleblowers, sometimes it's very difficult to get to the through. And I think the most famous whistleblower of all times, of at least the recent times, it was Snowdened. Marooned in Moscow in 2014. Almost stateless. What are your thoughts about helping him, trying to find some leniency, some mercy for this person? That's all. Thank you. You quoted Snowden. We could also quote Julien Assange on we, we at Reporters Without Borders, we do advocate as much as we can for him, because he made a crucial contribution to journalism and is clearly prosecuted for this. And the, his extradition to the US would clearly undermine journalism because it would set a very dangerous precedent. And we know that the perimeter of state secret is already very broad in the US and in a lot of other countries. And so it is really our duty. What we can have very different opinions about Assange. Nobody is forced to like him, but clearly defending him is a way to defend the future of journalists who investigate for the public interest in this field. And he revealed some of the most important, some very important war crimes and that's really our duty to defend him. I think I got permission for one more question. Anybody back here? Thank you very much, Melissiakli from the Geneva Hub of the Global Shippers Community. So my question is, one of the foundation of freedom of expression is this notion of free market of ideas, right? And my question is, do we still have such a free market? Do we see that people can actually come together and have those different conversations with controversial ideas? Or are people mostly operating in silos? And my question is the following. In such a context, is supporting high value speech sufficient? Or should we actually target and be more demanding on this kind of low value speech that we see all around and be more demanding on people, hold people more accountable on what they say online on platforms, et cetera. So that's the question. I don't know who wants to take it. No, what you said is very important. Journalism is not just about freedom of expression, about free speech. That's about rights and duties. This is about ethics. This is about methodology. This is about editorial independence. How do we secure this? And we spoke about what we do. But the most important thing is what you can do in this audience and beyond. Are you a government official? Are you working for a digital platform? Are you working for an advertiser? Or for civil society, of course. And there are existing market solutions to promote quality journalism in this ecosystem. We launched the Journalism Trust Initiative based on standardization, certification, incentivization. If you're an advertiser, you could use it to spend your money and give your money as an advertiser to quality journalism. If you are a digital platform, you can use this market solution in your algorithmic indexation. We have launched another initiative which is a partnership on information democracy to impose democratic safeguards in the information and communication space. We have now 45 signatory governments. We have created an implementation body, a civil society-led implementation body which is called the Form and Information Democracy. We make and we did work a lot with Maria Ressa. We made 350 recommendations for the regulation of self-regulation. We are currently launching the Observatory on Information Democracy, which is supposed to be the equivalent of the IPCC for the information cause. This process is quite similar to the process for climate change, but for the information cause. So it does exist. It is on the table. Now we need all types of stakeholders to take action. So please have a look and we are ready to work with you. And I should add, if you are working in development aid, Maria Ressa is co-chairing an international fund to help with the quality journalism in the global south. And as she says, very eloquently democracy is at stake. So that's another possibility. I think an appropriate place to end, both on action, what we can all do and what's at stake. Thank you, Patrick. And thanks to all of you for being here and all of our terrific panelists. Thank you so much.