Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office Blogs

On April 1, 2007, I was captured by the police and dragged to the Harare Central Police Station’s notorious Law and Order section. I was pushed into a stuffy room and ordered to sit on a dirty, green carpet. Behind the desk was a lick-spittle man – tall, dark, thin and stern-faced. On the neat Mahogany desk […]

Ambassador Tom Fletcher and visiting Minister for the Middle East Alistair Burt delivered a video message from Beirut marking World Press Freedom Day.

My team of prosecutors in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines will meet in Kingstown later today to announce new guidelines to ensure transparency and equal access to information for the media about criminal procedures. Prosecutors and journalists will launch the new ‘Prosecution Media Protocol’, a first for the Caribbean, which sets the ground rules for […]

I grew up surrounded by people who had everything they required to lift themselves and their communities out of poverty. Despite this, they and their communities remained deep seated in abstract poverty. I felt that becoming a journalist would help in some way: it would make me an agent of change by bringing their stories […]

In 1988, when Dr Ha Si Phu wrote a think-piece entitled “a shared journey of the intellect” it was subsequently photocopied and passed from hand to hand by his closest associates. This piece, which exposed flaws in Marxist-Leninist theory, was well received by intellectuals and the wider public at that time. Right after that, for […]

Journalists are the eyes, voice and ears of a society. When you kill a journalist you contribute to creating a blind, mute and deaf community, unable to understand the environment around it. The killing of journalists is the most severe aggression towards freedom of expression worldwide. Every person has the right to knowledge. Those who […]

The Foreign Office’s Storify on World Press Freedom Day 2013. [View the story “World Press Freedom Day” on Storify]