Thank you very much.
Thank you for raising Maria Ressa. Maria Ressa is my client. She's a Nobel Peace Prize winner in the Philippines who has been targeted for speaking truth to power. Her case has many overlaps with Jimmy Lai's. What we see in those two cases is not just the targeting of one individual journalist but also the attempt to shut down entire media ecosystems or networks—Apple Daily in the case of Hong Kong and Rappler in the Philippines. We've seen that same tactic employed against José Rubén Zamora in Guatemala, the founder and owner of elPeriódico. Again, like Apple Daily, it's an anti-corruption, pro-democracy and pro-human rights newspaper. Similarly, we've seen it with Mir Shakil-ur-Rahman in Pakistan, the owner and founder of Geo TV.
This is now a trend we're seeing: “lawfare” being used. One of the tactics I'm increasingly seeing is using regulatory and fraud laws against journalists or media owners. The reason they're used is that many people, when they see a defamation law being used, for example, against a piece of public interest journalism, know there's something wrong with that. They instinctively recognize there's something wrong with that. When they hear Maria Ressa being called, completely fraudulently, a tax evader, or Jimmy Lai being called a fraudster, some people may think there's no smoke without fire. It's a tactic now being used because it damages not only the message but also the messenger. What I would say about that is, this is now a tactic that UN experts, NGOs—such as CPJ and RSF—and lawyers like us who work in this field have been seeing for some years.
What we haven't yet seen is an organized response. Canada has shown real leadership on media freedom issues through the Media Freedom Coalition and elsewhere. We think it's time to recognize that the enemies of press freedom are organized. We have to get organized, too. It is high time for us to recognize the tactics and trends that are being used and work out proactive ways to tackle them.