Why Britain must stop turning a blind eye to oppression

A critique of Liz Truss’s foreign policy ambitions through the lens of media freedoms

By William Horsley,Chatham House, London, 20 December 2021

Setting out her ambitious vision for Britain’s foreign policy in a speech at Chatham House on December 8, Liz Truss, the Foreign Secretary, began with a resounding call for bold leadership and an end to what she called the free world’s ‘age of introspection’.

As a respected diplomatic player and science and tech superpower, she said, the United Kingdom would be the natural leader of a global ‘network of liberty’ made up of free enterprise democracies. It would also be ‘unashamedly commercial’ in promoting the trade and other national interests of Global Britain.  

Two days later, two journalists – Dmitry Muratov from Russia and Maria Ressa from the Philippines – received the Nobel Peace Prize at a ceremony in Oslo for their courageous fight to defend freedom of expression, which was described as a precondition for democracy and lasting peace.

The award drew fresh attention to a harsh and sensitive reality that calls for concerted action: authoritarianism is spreading more widely in a world in which democracy and freedom of the press are increasingly under attack.

The Nobel Prize committee’s citation highlighted the essential role of free and independent journalism in protecting societies against abuses of power, lies and war propaganda by states, and in enabling an ‘informed public’ to know what is being done in their name.

In her speech, Truss placed special emphasis on countering hostile autocratic regimes that use disinformation to undermine truth and spread malign ideologies to ‘gain the upper hand’.

She singled out China and Russia as adversaries who, she said, use technology and economics as tools of control. She was on less sure ground when questioned about protecting individual rights in Saudi Arabia and other countries which Britain wants as partners.

Saudi Arabia still enjoys privileged trade and security ties with the UK despite its well-documented record of serious abuses and rights violations, especially the murder in 2018 of Jamal Khashoggi, the exiled Saudi journalist, in the country’s Istanbul consulate. This year a US Intelligence report concluded that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had approved the assassination. Human rights groups insist that a culture of impunity in Saudi Arabia is shielding those in high office who are suspected of planning and carrying out the killing.

In 2019, Jeremy Hunt, who was then foreign secretary, launched an initiative, the Global Media Freedom Coalition, described as a long-term priority for British foreign policy. It recognized the same dangers that the Nobel committee has flagged. A worldwide surge in attacks on independent media, including record numbers of journalists killed and the criminalization by governments of journalists’ activities, is part of a general assault on the rule of law and respect for individual rights affecting every region of the world, and infecting established democracies.

The campaign, jointly led by Britain and Canada, made the protection of freedom of expression and of independent journalism a ‘first order’ issue. That was an important step for Britain to take. It was a clear recognition that media freedom matters because it gives effect to a range of other democratic rights, including access to justice and the right to vote in free and fair elections.

Close to 50 nations have now signed a formal pledge as coalition members. In it they must acknowledge that all too often governments themselves are the source of threats to media freedom, rather than protector from them. And they undertake not only to put their own houses in order but to confront abuses of media freedom elsewhere, and to intervene at the highest level with the governments of countries where media freedom is at risk

Britain’s parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee conducted its own assessment of the government’s Media Freedom Campaign in February 2021. It called the initiative vitally important and praised the setting up of a Media Defence Fund, managed by Unesco, to support free, independent and plural media environments around the globe.

However, it found that the government has allocated too few resources to the initiative, speaks out too softly against abuses and is seen in some cases as ‘trading away its values’ to obtain commercial or political advantage.

The parliamentarians’ report concludes that Britain must do more to shame the perpetrators in Saudi Arabia, to ensure accountability for the killing of Khashoggi, and in Malta, where justice has still not been done four years after the 2017 murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia, the investigative journalist who was killed by a car bomb.

In Turkey, British officials have been conspicuously reluctant to speak out against a large number of arbitrary detentions and reprisals against critical journalists. The committee notes that the journalists with whom they had contact were too fearful to have their names published. It calls on British diplomats to criticize such violations in Turkey ‘forcefully’.

Democracy is seen as under pressure around the world while autocracy is on the rise, a view that appears borne out by the recent Pew Research Centre survey of global attitudes, which found that the United States, Britain’s closest ally, is no longer generally perceived as a good model of democracy.

Democratic states cannot alter this perception by being blind in one eye to their own shortcomings or those of their allies. To succeed, British foreign policy needs two good eyes.