Protect who reports inconvenient truths

A public one-day bilingual (Italian and English) workshop in Rome with the President of the Senate as guest of honour, MPs, international speakers, media experts, journalists to tackle the more subtle limitations to press freedom and to expression freedom that are spread without full awareness by the public and without full attention of media and of many operators of the media world themselves. The most effective detection and measurement tools aimed at detecting and categorize these violations. An exchange of best practices. The conference will involve NGOs, MPs, representatives of national and international institutions and organizations of journalists and publishers. Among the speakers there will be representatives of organizations involved in the monitoring of intimidation in other countries. The aim is to promote a shared vision of the problem from different countries and to discuss the doability of an harmonized procedure for monitoring threats and abuses. The results will be summarized in a document that will widely circulated and also presented to public authorities and policy makers at national and European level. The document will be designed as a working draft to enable organizations in other countries to reflect on the problem and to contribute their views and proposals. The workshop results will be presented on July 3rd in a press conference.

The seminary in Roma follows the two-day workshop to exchange experiences between investigative journalists and media freedom practitioners and experts promoted by Journalismfund.eu in Brussels in 8-10 May 2015. That seminar´s aim was threefold:
• Bringing together two professional networks crucial to this activity from different
parts of the continent: investigative journalism community and media freedom
experts.
• Gathering and sharing important inputs on every day threats to freedom of the press
and of expression experienced in different regions of Europe.
• Gathering contributions to develop a credible measuring tool for threats to/breaches
of freedom of expression in Europe.

The results of both workshops, the one in Brussels and the other in Roma, will be shared with the publication of a report produced by Ossigeno per l’Informazione together with Journalismfund in close cooperation with the European Center for Press and Media Freedom ECPMF academic staff.
The report will be presented in the international conference that will be held in Leipzig in October 2015.

The report will be shared in a 30 page PDF for publication on the website of Ossigeno and of the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom. The results will also be presented during the conference organized by the ECPMF in October 2015 in Leipzig and abroad in bilateral meeting with NGOs and organizations of european countries interested in developing a monitoring activity on their territories.