Chapultepec Grand Prize Acceptance Speech Carolina Henriquez-Schmitz, director of TrustLaw, Thomson Reuters Foundation

We are indeed seeing that as authoritarianism expands, press freedom is eroding around the world, with an alarming rise in the deliberate targeting and silencing of journalists by governments and powerful groups, desperate to stifle unwanted narratives and public debate.

As you know, this isn’t just a problem in countries with dictatorial and authoritarian regimes. The clampdown on press freedom takes many different forms and is happening everywhere, including in the world’s leading democracies – you don’t need to look very far, with the US and much of Latin America experiencing nothing short of a press freedom crisis.

As a lawyer I am probably biased, but among the many and wide-ranging threats to media freedom that have proliferated in recent years, it is the increasing legal attacks on journalists and newsrooms that keeps me up at night. An array of sweeping and repressive legislative, regulatory, and other legal threats to journalists are stifling their ability to operate freely and independently, with grave repercussions for the journalists themselves and for the audiences they serve.

These are not only attacks on journalists and journalism, but also on the public’s right to know and their ability to make free and informed decisions. They are attacks on democracy.

The figures also tell a bleak story – the Committee to Protect Journalists reports a record number of journalists were jailed last year. And, 361 reporters are currently behind bars, with China, Israel, Myanmar, Belarus and Russia among the worst offenders.

Most of these journalists have been jailed under legislation originally built to protect people and society, turned into instruments of retaliation, intimidation and oppression.

At the Foundation we call this ‘weaponization of the law’. And it is spreading like wildfire.

To understand and raise awareness of the scale of the problem, in 2023, we partnered with Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism to map the legal threats to journalists worldwide. The resulting report revealed an unprecedented growth in legal attacks to journalists, with an increasing number of governments weaponizing the law to undermine independent journalism. In fact, nearly 50% of the journalists we surveyed, representing 106 countries, said that they or their media organisation were facing legal threats, illustrating the sheer scale of this war on media freedom.

Designed to ensnare and cripple journalists, widespread abuses of the law range from the introduction of new legislation purporting to be in the interests of national security, to the rise in claims of financial crimes and illegal funding to delegitimize journalists’ work.

The archetypal example is that of the ‘foreign agent law’ that has become a highlight of the authoritarian playbook. Foreign agent laws aim prevent foreign influence in domestic affairs, which is arguably a legitimate action to protect democratic institutions but, over time, autocratic leaders have latched on to the fact that they can easily invoke and abuse these laws to stifle dissent.

The playbook often goes as follows. Under these laws, organizations receiving foreign funding are required to register with the justice ministry and submit regular reports on their activities, finances and interactions. This is justified to ensure they are not engaging in ‘political activities’ on behalf of a foreign power.

But the definition of what constitutes ‘political activity’ is kept so deliberately vague that it could encompass virtually anything that might influence public opinion, from hosting an educational event to simply printing opinion polls.

Once their work is branded as such, their assets can be frozen, bank accounts closed and the donations or grants that once kept them afloat cut off. If they refuse to comply, they could face fines and even prison sentences.

We saw these laws first used as such by Russia and India in the early 2010s, targeting NGOs whose work in areas like election monitoring and human rights advocacy were undermining the credibility of the government.

Very quickly, though, that spotlight expanded to include independent media. Newsrooms and individual journalists conducting essential public interest reporting on issues like government corruption, election rigging and war crimes.

More and more states are now taking a page out of this playbook. We see it in Eastern Europe. We see it in Central Asia. And we especially see it in Latin America. El Salvador, Peru, Paraguay, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Venezuela. All have either adopted their version of this legislation or tabled draft bills in the last few years.

And this is just one of myriad ways in which the law is being weaponized to silence journalists and dissent. In the face of this, at the Thomson Reuters Foundation we expanded our work to include legal programming that strengthens media freedom frameworks and helps protect and defend journalists and newsrooms against legal threats. Coupled with our decades long media development programmes for journalists and newsrooms, we aim to adopt a holistic approach that is meant to tackle the increasing and evolving challenges plaguing media freedom and media actors around the world.

This work has increasingly involved supporting exiled independent newsrooms, who are increasingly forced to flee their home countries due to this weaponization of the law, by helping them to set up their operations in new jurisdictions and navigate a new legal landscape to ensure they can continue to do their critical public interest reporting.

Take the case of El Salvador, where the Journalists Association registered over 40 journalists fleeing the country in the months preceding the adoption of a foreign agent law earlier this year. They did not need to wait around to see how it would play out. They have seen this film before. The Thomson Reuters Foundation has been supporting some of these media organisations with their legal needs as they move into exile – from structuring and incorporating in a new country and understanding tax laws, to registering their trademarks and accessing legal advice on employment issues.

As ‘lawfare’ against journalists escalates in intensity and complexity, lawyers play a critical role in safeguarding free and independent media. Behind all the cases against journalists who have become household names — Evan Gershkovich, Maria Ressa, Jose Ruben Zamora — there are often-unseen lawyers representing them.

They are taking truly remarkable risks to do so.

Governments around the world are increasingly threatening, arresting and prosecuting lawyers to deter them from representing journalists. The typical tactics include targeting their ability to practice the profession and disabling them through criminal suits.

This has become a very effective strategy. It sends an unequivocal message not only to the individual lawyer but to the entire legal profession – if you pursue these cases, we will go after you. The potential chilling effect cannot be understated.

Take the case of Jose Ruben Zamora, which epitomises this trend.

Everyone here will be familiar with Zamora’s arrest following El Periódico’s reporting on alleged corruption by then-Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei.

What some may be less familiar with is what happened to his legal defence.

Zamora’s first lawyers were Mario Castañeda and Romeo Montoya. Just five days after taking on the case they were informed at pre-trial hearings that the Guatemalan Special Prosecutor’s Office was initiating an investigation into both for an alleged conspiracy to obstruct justice. A few months later, arrest warrants were issued, and they were criminally charged.

In the case of the legal team who replaced them, Juan Francisco Solorzano Foppa and Justino Brito, the pattern was almost a carbon copy. Investigations were opened into their alleged obstruction of justice, followed by issuance of arrest warrants and criminal charges.

By the time we get to Zamora’s third lawyer, Christian Ulate, the threat of persecution was so grave he fled the country, reporting that he was being followed, all his cases had collapsed and pressure was being placed on the Guatemalan Bar Association to revoke his licence.

Remarkably, despite these risks, lawyers continue to courageously put themselves forward to defend press freedom. The Foundation remains steadfastly committed to facilitating that defence. We are incredibly proud to be one of the founding members of the Legal Network for Journalists at Risk — a single access point to connect journalists with specialist legal counsel, including legal defence, trial monitoring, strategic litigation and redress for rights violations.

But we want to do more than simply react to these attacks in the moment, at which point it is often too late. We are laser focused on a more proactive mission — to build up the legal resilience of the independent media ecosystem as a whole. We want to ensure newsrooms are not only better positioned to withstand these threats but also able to limit their exposure in the first place.

We do this through our Legal Service for Independent Media, which draws on TrustLaw, our global pro bono network of over 120,000 lawyers in 190 countries, who are willing to give up their time, expertise and know-how to help equip non-profit organisations, journalists and newsrooms to counter legal threats and strengthen their resilience and sustainability.

Lawyers in our network are now providing newsrooms counsel on vital issues like data protection, defamation, due diligence or foreign funding requirements, mitigating the risk of abusive lawsuits.

They are compiling invaluable resources, like checklists for journalists to tick off before publishing a story, minimising their legal liability.

They are running bespoke workshops with newsrooms to pinpoint their legal vulnerabilities.

And they are guiding exiled newsrooms through the process of registering as a legal entity in a new jurisdiction, as well as how best to structure their operations to maximise revenue and remain sustainable.

While it is true we are at a precarious moment for global press freedom, the level of collaboration and impact we are seeing throughout our network gives me tremendous hope.

It shows newsrooms and journalists are by no means alone in this moment. The legal community stands firmly by their side.

And, as the media landscape continues to evolve and threats to press freedom emerge like never before, it’s imperative that we continue to expand and deepen our work. Never has the Inter-American Press Association’s work, and the work of everyone in this room, been more critical.

We are deeply grateful for this recognition and, more importantly, for the work you do, and we look forward to collaborating with you in the unwavering defence of press freedom.

Thank you.