2023 Summit for Democracy
The Summit for Democracy is a virtual summit hosted by the United States government “to renew democracy at home and confront autocracies abroad”. The first edition was held in 2021, and as part of this ‘Year of Action’ to mark its second edition, governments around the world are launching multi-stakeholder platforms, called “Democracy Cohorts”, to take concerted action toward commitments in areas of common interest.
Each Democracy Cohort brings together civil society representatives, private sector leaders, philanthropic partners, academics, and government decision-makers on issues vital to democratic renewal.
The governments of Canada and the Netherlands, building on their leadership as the co-chairs of the Media Freedom Coalition and facilitated by the international media development organization, Internews, are building a Media Freedom Cohort to take advantage of the numerous commitments already made to advancing media freedom around the world. Based on the media freedom pledges made at the first summit, they have created three working groups around identified priority areas: Protecting Journalists’ Safety & Security; Advancing Freedom of Expression; and Bolstering Independent and Diverse Media.
WAN-IFRA’s aim as part of the Working Group on Protecting Journalists’ Safety & Security is to mobilize support for the protection of journalists and gather commitments from leading media organizations, philanthropic foundations, tech platforms, civil society, academia and governments.
The Media Freedom Cohort has created a template form to compile all these pledges from leading voices from all over the world. You can chose to submit your pledge through this template form, or reach out to the co-leads of the Working Group: Rachael Kay, Executive Director at IFEX, kay@ifex.org, and/or Elisabet Cantenys, Executive Director at the ACOS Alliance, elisabet@acosalliance.org.
Please keep in mind that we have a deadline of February 24.
The Summit for Democracy will take place on March 29-30, when a series of events will mark the publication of all the collected pledges. I hope to see your contributions included.
With thanks and best regards,
Andrew Heslop
Executive Director, Press Freedom
WAN-IFRA
