Comment by Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova on the report by UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay on the safety of journalists and the issue of impunity for 2022-2023

On December 13, in Paris, the report by UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay on the safety of journalists and the issue of impunity for 2022-2023, which deliberately ignored the facts of targeted killings of Russian journalists by the Kiev regime, was not approved during the resumed meeting of the 34th session of the Intergovernmental Council of UNESCO's International Programme for Development and Communication (IPDC).

For the first time in the history of IPDC, UNESCO's main biennial document on the safety of journalists and impunity for crimes against them was not approved, but only taken note of. The Intergovernmental Council of the Programme took this decision not by consensus, as in previous years, but by vote. Only 14 countries, representing mainly the ‘collective West’ and its associates, voted for, while the remaining 21 abstained or voted against. Thus, the reliability of the data presented in the report has been called into question, which no longer allows it to be perceived as a reliable source of information on the global situation with security of journalists.

Russia has rejected point blank any form of approval of the document that grossly distorts the real situation in the safety of journalists and, for obvious political reasons, ignores the brutal killings of Russian correspondents by the Kiev regime. We proceed from the fact that this text is in fact a source of misinformation in the area of media workers safety.

Meanwhile, we note that the report was prepared using a non-transparent methodology that was not approved by anyone. This procedure, developed in private by the Secretariat, gave priority to information and opinions from NGOs rather than Member States, which undermines the very intergovernmental nature of UNESCO. In the process of reviewing the scandalous draft report, it emerged that the problem was systemic and that it was also faced by several states of the Global South whose official data on media killings were ignored in the document. However, the UNESCO Secretariat failed to explain clearly the origin of this methodology, its legal basis and whether it was in line with the directives of the UNESCO governing bodies to the Director-General, who is obliged to respond to all cases of killings and attacks on journalists without any distinctions.

The broad wave of indignation among the professional journalist community also made it possible to draw attention to the problem of arbitrariness in the work of the UNESCO Secretariat and to prevent the approval of the document that deliberately distorts the reality in this area. The open letter from the Union of Journalists of Russia and the Union of Journalists of Moscow to the Director-General of UNESCO alone was signed by more than a hundred media outlets and their associations not only from Russia but also from abroad. Many media broadcasters sent personal appeals to Audrey Azoulay. We thank all those who have shown concern and helped to achieve a triumph of justice through their actions.

We believe that such developments were a serious blow at Audrey Azoulay’s reputation and caused a substantive damage to the UNESCO Secretariat headed by her. The countries of the “collective West” have equally discredited themselves by demonstrating to the rest of the world their real commitment to protecting the safety of journalists and their overall level of respect for human life. The Global South has seen for itself the value of their empty slogans about media pluralism and freedom of speech.

The Russian side is not going to condone the continued preparation of such pseudo statistic reports and, in general, corrupt practices, to meet the interests of a narrow group of countries, by the organisation which is a part of the United Nations. The entire set of accumulated problems in UNESCO's information and communication sector will be examined in detail at the forthcoming meetings of its governing bodies.

We will consistently stand for the principles provided in the UN and UNESCO charters, which are a cornerstone of international cooperation and unite like-minded Global South countries that oppose the imposition of the notorious “rules-based world order.”