Vive la Différence

08 May 07 | Comment

These days no freedom of expression group operates on its own in the way that Nick Fillmore alleges (Have the world’s free press campaigners got their priorities wrong? 3 May) – or indeed would even want to.

There are many ways to approach organising human rights advocacy, but Nick seems unwilling to recognise this.

The international effort to free Gaza hostage journalist Alan Johnston has no core organiser, but is driven by the shared concerns of disparate groups that otherwise have little in common. He chides International Freedom of Expression Exchange (IFEX) network members for not all being as ‘activist’ as their fellow member Reporters sans Frontières (RSF), but the “e-mail and the occasional mission to countries” he derides are tools they all use.

Sometimes the subtle intervention works best– asking a military contact in Iraq to put a call in for a colleague held in Abu Ghraib; a promise to a dying hunger striker; a briefing to a well-placed civil servant.

As he correctly says, ‘depending on the circumstances’ a free speech group can make the case for civil disobedience, economic sanctions, aggressive litigation – and if you take Nick’s argument to its natural conclusion – armed resistance.

And ‘depending on the circumstances’ – the case can be made against. Whatever, these are cases that must be made to help those “living with the fear and repression generated by killings, intimidation, censorship and other threats to press freedom”.

But the cases need to be made in London and Washington as well as Khartoum and Baghdad. This is why it is important to maintain the diversity of campaigns for free expression worldwide. There never is just one single message to express.

It is also why Nick is wrong to suggest that free expression groups resist alliances. He cites only one significant partnership between free speech advocates, the IFEX Tunisia Monitoring Group (TMG), of which Index on Censorship is a member. The TMG links free speech NGOs from around the western world and Africa in partnership with official and unofficial Tunisian rights groups.

Yet there have been many more programmes around the world like it in the last 12 month alone. In Colombia, a partnership between a coalition of six local organisations and seven global and regional IFEX members – including RSF – identified key obstacles and set priorities for a strategy to support press freedom and free expression last September.

No fewer than 14 press freedom groups joined forces to support free speech advocates in Sri Lanka in March. There have been a score of similar joint missions to countries from Pakistan to Mexico in the last 12 months. Each one is based around cooperation, partnership and shared resources.

The absolute start point for all free expression work today is with the local partner groups – the human rights campaigners, women’s NGOs, independent media and civil society already active on the ground.

Nick is wrong to suggest that this is unusual, especially by harking back to days when under funded groups were thrown into competition by donors whose priorities were the best deal for their nations’ taxpayers or their minister’s political objectives, not necessarily global free speech rights.

He has a rosy-tinted view of the motives of the funding ‘community’. For some time the funders’ fashion was to press for mergers – not partnerships – between free expression groups, to reduce donor administration (and their staff) and reduce the funds given overall. There are some 40 key donors who are de facto clients in a small, competitive and unregulated market and a shrinking pool of funds.

Many donors exploit this relationship. Up to 40% of the costs of a project can be withheld until after the projects are completed, forcing small groups to cannibalise scarce resources to complete them – effectively funding the funders – before the balance is paid. Some expect lead partners to impose management standards on partners working in war zones and cash dollar only ‘economies’ they would not dare try to apply directly themselves. Many donors have thinly disguised political objectives that reflect their government’s own – especially in the Middle East and Latin America.

The donors – and Nick – also fail to credit the view that just as plurality is a good thing for independent media, it is a good thing for independent media rights groups too. Each of the free expression groups – north and south – that Nick is so keen to rope together in the name of ‘efficiency’, already work together to that end in flexible and mutually beneficial relationships.

Depending on their respective specialities, strengths, agendas and mandates, even their country base, they are free to build large or small coalitions to suit the needs of the people they are trying to reach, not the needs of the donors.

They all have specific methodologies developed over years. Most would be reluctant to subsume their skills into a single melting pot of consensus activities, mixed at best to cut western taxpayers’ burdens, at worst to suit a political agenda that is either confused, ill-defined or politically suspect.

This is why this organisational diversity should be preserved. The many groups on the ground – all of whom work together in the same way as their northern partners – need just the same freedom to pick and choose between different partners north and south.

Links are made through a dozen international conferences convened each year, specifically to facilitate cooperation and if all else fails there’s the catch-up meeting between colleagues of different organisations over coffee.

Index on Censorship alone is in contact with 27 different international and local groups, publications and universities as it puts together its own relatively small portfolio of free expression support projects from Iraq and Iran to Colombia via Albania in 2008.

There will always be the need for more cooperation and all the northern free expression groups need to work harder to reinforce the technical capacity and build the resources of the groups on the ground they work with.

But there is no one-size-fits-all solution to the problem. Naturally evolving partnerships are the fairest and most practical way to find the right one.

And possibly the most efficient too, judging by the sheer number of joint campaigns and shared alerts logged daily by IFEX’s website. If all that work is being done for $15 million a year by some 100 groups worldwide, as Nick claims, at an average UK £75,000 per group the free expression world is really getting its money’s worth.

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