VIENNA, 7 June 2023 – Today, the Office of the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media (RFoM) and the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly presented the OSCE Guidelines for monitoring online violence against female journalists at a joint web dialogue on “Countering online violence against women: OSCE Guidelines for monitoring online violence against female journalists.” The event brought together a diverse group of parliamentarians, diplomats and civil society from the OSCE region for a discussion of the role national parliaments can play in monitoring and combating online violence against female journalists and politicians.
OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media Teresa Ribeiro welcomed participants, stressing the importance of collective action in tackling gender-based online attacks against journalists. “Safety of female journalists online is particularly important, since female journalists are being harassed and threatened both because of their work and because of their gender,” she said. “And this is also why we are currently developing Guidelines For Monitoring Online Violence Against Female Journalists. This new tool will help to detect, predict and ultimately prevent the escalation of online violence against women journalists.”
“A free press is at the heart of democracy. Journalists must be able to report the truth and facts to inform the public,” said the OSCE PA Special Representative on Gender Issues Hedy Fry (Canada). “We, as parliamentarians, have a duty to ensure that they can do that safely. Parliaments also have a role to play in helping the public gain a better understanding of online violence against women journalists, including by promoting the collection of data on online-based violence.”
Swedish parliamentarian Johan Büser, rapporteur of the OSCE PA Committee on Democracy, Human Rights and Humanitarian Questions, spoke about the importance of countering online violence against women from a human rights perspective and emphasised the value of the OSCE PA as an international parliamentary forum in addressing the issue.
“I believe the OSCE PA has many tools at its disposal to address online violence against women,” Büser said. “One on hand, it can propose resolutions on this topic, which should then be applied to the national legislative and policy framework. On the other, the OSCE PA is valuable because it can bring together parliamentarians and experts from all over the OSCE region to discuss, exchange and identify best practices and lessons learned in dealing with the cases of online violence, which can then be tailor-made and applied to different countries.”
Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Sheffield Diana Maynard, presented the OSCE Guidelines for monitoring online violence against female journalists, followed by a brief discussion with participants.
The OSCE Guidelines for monitoring online violence against female journalists are aimed to help identify key indicators and metrics signalling escalation of online violence against women journalists and will be published soon.
For more information about the work of RFoM, please click here. More information about the work of the OSCE PA Special Representative on Gender Issues can be found here.
To watch today's event, please click here.
